Newsletter #2 (June 2020)

The following announcement was sent to subscribers of the Codidact announcements mailing list on June 17, 2020. It has been reformatted here.

Hello! Thank you for following our project to build a place where communities can come together to share knowledge, a place that puts people first and empowers both learners and teachers. We've had lots of changes since last month and want to share our progress.

New Communities

We've added four more communities to our network since our last newsletter. Photography & Video was our first "starting from scratch" community; the founders chose to not import any content from SE and started with a blank slate. If you have questions about photography, this means they won't be buried under a bunch of imported content -- so go ahead and ask! While you're there, check out the Contests/Critique category; this month we're looking for photos of sunsets. Visit the site at https://photography.codidact.com .

Scientific Speculation is a site for worldbuilding and other speculative developments that can be extrapolated from the science we know today. What you ask doesn't have to be real; if you can draw a line from today's science to it, your question is welcome. Faster-than-light travel, shapeshifters, superintelligent autonomous robots, spacefaring cephalopods… bring your imagination, grounded in science. Explore these ideas at https://scientific-speculation.codidact.com .

We launched our next two sites together a week ago, both starting fresh. Cooking is a site we hope will have broad appeal -- everybody needs to eat, and many of us are doing more cooking than we did a few months ago, so this is a great time to ask your questions and share your knowledge. Also check out the Recipes category, where you can share how you cook everything from breakfast basics to exotic dinners and desserts. The Recipes category uses our new "article" post type, also suitable for blogs and wikis, because not everything on our sites is necessarily a question. Check it out at https://cooking.codidact.com .

At the same time, we also launched Electrical Engineering, a site for professionals, hobbyists, and students of electrical and electronic engineering. Some of the top users from another EE site joined together to found this site, and we're looking forward to seeing it develop. Join our engineering experts at https://electrical.codidact.com .

These communities join Writing and Outdoors, which we wrote about in our previous newsletter, and our network-wide Meta site. We maintain a complete list of communities at https://codidact.com .

Do you have a community looking for a place to ask and answer questions and share knowledge? If you've got a group of interested people, we'd like to work with you to build a community on Codidact. You can post a request or add your support to one of our current proposals under review in our Site Proposals category at https://meta.codidact.com/categories/10. Current proposals include programming, history, tabletop role-playing-games, and more.

Platform Progress

We've added new features and made other improvements to the platform since our last newsletter. You can see a detailed list at https://meta.codidact.com/questions/39539#answer-39540. Some highlights:

• We now support MathJax, a critical feature for science and math sites. You can see it in use on Scientific Speculation.

• We've added suggested edits. Now even if you don't have the privilege to edit directly, you can propose an edit and have it reviewed, increasing opportunities to participate.

• We added the "article" post type, alongside questions and answers. Articles are top-level posts (like questions) that support comments, but don’t allow answers. Articles allow communities to create blogs, wikis, other resources -- even recipes, which you can see in action on Cooking.

• We improved the tools for building site-specific help. Moderators can now group topics and control the order.

• We improved the data-import process so it can be much more selective.

• You can now use two-factor authentication with your Codidact account.

Thank you again for your interest in Codidact! We hope you'll join our active communities, help shape new ones, and/or contribute to our open-source project.

The Codidact Team
https://codidact.org

posted over 4 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

4y ago

Monica Cellio‭ staff

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