Post History

I initially was lukewarm about this proposal but now I think I like it, at least in the broad strokes. In particular, I prefer the idea of a separate place where work-needed questions are temporarily held—I'll call it the Workshop—with its own comments, over an optionally-private comment thread.

The reasons to have a separate Workshop all stem from the ways that interacting with questions being workshopped (should) differ from interacting with acceptable questions. These differences include:

* The audiences are different. The audience for regular questions is the set of people interested in answering questions. The audience for questions in the Workshop is the set of people interested in improving other people's questions. Different audience members should see the things they're interested in.

* The available actions should be different. A question in the Workshop *should not be answerable*. This prevents answerers from wasting their effort on answering what they think the question is, as opposed to what the final form of the question will be. It also, of course, provides real motivation to askers to work with the community to graduate their questions from the Workshop. We might also want voting in the Workshop to work differently—I have a pretty loose sense that a question upvote currently means ‘I'd like to see someone answer this question,’ and a downvote ‘I think this question doesn't belong here or needs improvement,’ and in the Workshop neither of those conditions really apply. But maybe we'd want to have a vote to graduate a question, instead of making it a single user's decision?

* The nature of the commentary is different. Threaded comments might be an acceptable way to separate question-feedback comments from other comments, but keeping the question-feedback comments in the Workshop seems like it would do an even better job of showing people what they want to see by default.

I'm not as excited about the proposed mechanism for how questions end up in or get graduated from the Workshop, but it'll do as a starting point.