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Community Rules
Was reading this Post and I certainly agree with the general differences like open source and non-profit that differentiate Codidact.
But the Community vs Repo point leaves some questions. Sure each Site/Community here is ultimately the masters of their own destiny, but where are new comers supposed to learn the different social and community rules established in each site? Does one site allow duplicates and another vehemently close them? What if the current cooking site community just decides they won't talk about meat now. Are we to set up a new one that can?
Some of these examples are rough; but communities aren't under a general vision so the only vision left will be the people at the helm of those communities. That will ultimately mean change and volatility of purpose.
2 answers
I agree; we need to help communities communicate clearly about their norms, particularly to newcomers. Each community has a "FAQ" or "introduction" topic in the help that moderators can edit, and moderators can create other help topics. Electrical Engineering has built out a body of site-specific help, for example.
But help isn't necessarily visible. New users are invited to take a tour, which is the same on all communities, but perhaps we can have that end with some moderator-editable next steps or help links. And perhaps every anonymous visit (that is, not from a signed-in user) should offer a "welcome" message with a link. One of our design goals is contextual guidance; when you're trying to do a thing, that's the place to see help about doing that thing. We should apply that principle to the site as a whole and offer some sort of contextual guidance to visitors -- ideally positive, more "please do X" and less "we forbid Y", to draw people in.
These are just rough ideas; we have aspirations, but none of this is designed or built yet. If you (anybody) have ideas about how/where to provide this information, please post on Meta (either answers here or separate feature proposals, depending on what works better for whatever you have in mind). Thanks!
We should hope that different communities have different moderation standards. On SE it was a huge problem that users started applying the standards from one community onto others. The majority of new users came from SO - a site with fairly strict moderation and zero tolerance against subjective topics. Then from SO they "spilled over" into the other communities and started applying the same strict moderation policies there. But by their nature, those other communities often discussed much more subjective and fuzzy topics than a site focused on practical engineering.
I think Codidact as whole should only state the general Terms of Service/Code of Conduct, but otherwise leave it to each site to decide how they should moderate content.
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