Welcome to Codidact Meta!
Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.
Enhancing community involvement with per-site Help Centers
By my understanding, one of the key features of the Codidact network is that individual communities are more in control of their local policies. In particular, it appears that community moderators are able to edit the per-community Help Center documents (e.g. this listing for Meta itself) and perhaps add new ones.
However, I feel like there is a general lack of transparency in this process, even if the overall resulting governance is transparent and community-oriented.
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Is my guess correct? The FAQ isn't detailed enough for me to discern this.
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Which help center documents, if any, are controlled by the Codidact Foundation, and which may be modified by the community? The organization of the article listing seems a bit arbitrary, and the distinction between "Help" and "Policy" columns isn't completely clear to me either.
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Why are the "Network FAQ" and "Codidact FAQ" separate documents?
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If communities indeed set some of their own policies, it doesn't appear that there's any formal procedure for this. The closest I could find was this example of a round-table discussion in the Software Meta category to update the site's topicality guidance, along with some related Meta questions specifically asking whether specific things would be on topic. It seems like a moderator took the initiative to solicit the discussion, personally took the apparent consensus into consideration, and made changes accordingly. Is that indeed the process?
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Do others agree with me, that it would be good for community engagement (and thus growth) to have more direct involvement and a clearer idea of how to get involved?
1 answer
In particular, it appears that community moderators are able to edit the per-community Help Center documents (e.g. this listing for Meta itself) and perhaps add new ones.
Yes. Community moderators can edit all help topics except the network-policy ones. A community's Meta category is a good place to work out changes or new content.
The topics in the Policy column (About the Network, Legal) are editable only by Codidact staff. These topics cover things like the terms of service. Moderators also see a mod-only section that might be similarly restricted but I'm not sure.
Why are the "Network FAQ" and "Codidact FAQ" separate documents?
The network FAQ is suitable for any instance, and is part of the seeded help in the software distribution. The Codidact Foundation FAQ is something we added to this instance to provide more transparency around the folks running this instance. We probably should have used that to replace the network FAQ. I might have fat-fingered an update; I'll look into it.
If communities indeed set some of their own policies, it doesn't appear that there's any formal procedure for this.
I'm sorry for any confusion we've caused. In general, communities use Meta to determine things like scope, local policies, and so on, and we assumed the same would apply for editing help. We have added a short intro to the help page to make it more obvious that communities can edit the help, since that's not true on many other platforms. Thank you for raising this.
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