We'd like to discuss advancing the proposed worldbuilding community and merging it with Scientific Speculation. A discussion on Sci Spec meta was positive (see also this comment thread on the proposal).

Specifically, if both communities agree, we would:

• Create a community (name discussion below)

• Set up URL redirection for existing Sci Spec links

• Create the following categories (discussion below)

  • General (questions, articles)
  • Science Only (questions, articles)
  • Workshop (articles)
  • Meta (questions, as usual)

• Add a rigorous-science tag to all questions in the Sci Spec Rigorous Science category and create a tag description based on the help for rigorous science questions

• Move posts from Sci Spec's Q&A and Rigorous Science categories into the new Science Only category

• Move worldbuilding Incubator questions to the General category (and move meta questions as appropriate)

I am cross-posting this proposal on Scientific Speculation and Proposals to try to reach all interested parties. If there's opposition to either, we'll stop and adjust. We are not trying to force a change on the existing Scientific Speculation community; we see this as an opportunity to grow.

Name and scope

"Worldbuilding" is an established term that seems to cover what this proposal is about. Scientific Speculation was originally created as a subset of the broader worldbuilding space -- people wanted just the science, not the magic. The name was inspired in part by the field of speculative fiction. Scientific Speculation has gotten some questions from people who are looking for information but are not actually building fictional worlds, and I assume such questions are still in scope. Scope details are up to the community and can be modified over time; I'm raising this now in case anybody thinks the name "worldbuilding" would deter types of questions that the community wants.

Two main categories

For most of our communities, the main category is called "Q&A". Here there would be two main categories, so we're looking for a name for the one that isn't restricted. Y'all worldbuilders are more creative than I am, so if you have a better idea than "General", please speak up. We prefer shorter names so the category row doesn't look terrible on smaller devices. ("Science Only" would render as two lines on a phone, most likely.)

I'm proposing that the first two categories support both Q&A and articles. Sharing information, as opposed to asking questions, has already come up on Scientific Speculation. I think we should help people share knowledge without having to manufacture a question first, if that makes more sense in context. Some of our communities separate articles/papers/resources into their own categories, but for Worldbuilding, I think it's better to mingle. More categories make things harder to notice, and if you're looking for information about stable orbits around binary stars, does it matter if some of the search results are answers and some are articles?

Question: should these categories also support the Wiki type for easier collaboration on shared resources, or just articles (and questions of course)?

Workshop

The Workshop category is a sandbox where people can refine ideas into questions that can be asked in the first two categories. Our Code Golf community has one, and the Worldbuilding community on SE had a "poor man's sandbox" on meta due to platform limitations there. The idea has been part of the worldbuilding proposal here from the beginning.

There's been some discussion of "exploration" questions (also on the Sci Spec link in the previous section). If we set up a sandbox, we will almost certainly get some creative exploration or brainstorming posts that never "graduate" to posts in the main categories. I think that's ok. It's pretty clear to me that a community that has creativity at its core is looking for this kind of space too, and we want to serve our communities as best we can. These discussions would be segregated from the main Q&A, people can provide feedback in comment threads (and threads make that not terrible), and new comments don't bump posts or light up the silver dot.

I would suggest not having votes in this category affect reputation (in either direction). It's a workshop or sandbox, not finished work.

Next steps

We've done our best to interpret past discussions (and voting on them) in creating this proposal. How'd we do? Would advancing this proposal as described here meet the needs of both worldbuilders and the existing Scientific Speculation community? (If so we'll have some followup questions.)