Policy: Review-My-Idea questions are permissible

Question

Edit: Thank you for your support! The tag has been created and the policy implemented.

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Some time ago I posted a Meta question [asking for insight](https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9956/40609) into how to ask Review-My-Idea questions. Generally speaking RMIQs violate at least three Help Center rules: they're open-ended, opinion-based and all answers have equal value. Despite knowing we needed some way of permitting these kinds of questions, the middlin' response to that previous post combined with existing rules left me voting to close these kinds of questions.

Then came @FrogOfJuly's Reality check: energy source for power armour, which is probably the best RMIQ asked to date. @FrogOfJuly is to be admired for the effort put into the post. Consequently, I've been holding back voting to close it because, frankly, it's a pain in the royal tuchus to tarnish quality.

I'm therefor asking for a formal vote on permitting RMIQs. We've done this before (Santa questions, the ACS, etc.), but we need an official meta post that can be linked (if necessary) from the Help Center or pointed to when people start voting to close for the reasons stated above.

It is proposed that Worldbuilding.SE permit Review-My-Idea questions and acknowledge them as an exception to some Stack Exchange rules

If acknowledged by no less than a ten-point positive score, acceptance of this proposal shall result in the creation of a tag: review-my-idea. Please do NOT go out and simply create this tag. Issues with the proposed summary and wiki should be resolved here before the tag is created and if the proposal fails the tag should NOT be created.

Summary:

Used when seeking review of a complete/detailed worldbuilding construction (the "idea"). Incomplete ideas or those lacking details will be closed. The only question: a request for the review. Any other questions will result in closure as Needs More Focus. These questions are permitted to violate specific Help Center prohibitions. Users are expected to up/down vote based on question, not idea, quality. It is strongly recommended to review this tag's wiki.

Wiki:

Use this tag to identify your question as a Review-My-Idea Question (RMIQ). Traditionally, RMIQs violate a number of Help Center prohibitions including, but not limited to, being open-ended, opinion-based, and leading to all answers having equal value. Questions using this tag may not be closed for violating those prohibitions, but may be closed for violating others (notably being too broad, AKA violating the Book Rule).

This tag implies the worldbuilding-process tag.

Posts inviting a review of a worldbuilding construction (the "idea") must conform to the following:

Complete and Detailed: The presented idea must be complete and detailed. This does not mean you may only present your entire world (see Scope:, below). No matter how large or small, if the idea is incomplete or lacking details (especially if the purpose of the review is to resolve known weaknesses or fill in missing concepts), then this tag cannot be used (the question shall be closed as Needs More Details). Worldbuilding constructs needing help resolving weaknesses or missing information must be asked as normal, non-review questions and this tag shall be arbitrarily removed if such is the case.

There is Only One Question: The presented idea may only be presented for a review. Therefore, there is only one question that may be asked: a request to review the idea. In keeping with Stack Exchange's rules, posts that have multiple questions ("What about A? What about B? What about C?") such that they're asking about divergent possibilities of the idea will be closed as Needs More Focus.

Goals and Conditions Required: The querent is required to explain the goals of the review and any limiting expectations.

Scope: Questions may not ask for a review of an entire world. Questions must be narrowly scoped, dealing with a specific aspect of a world. Questions asking for a review of climate are specifically warned to keep the review narrowly focused as planetary climate is a very large and very complex construction.

Edits: Querents (original posters) may NOT edit their post as answers point out possible improvements. The specific goal of an RMIQ is to review the presented idea — not to produce a final or corrected idea. If the querent wants the next iteration of the idea to be reviewed, it should be presented as a new question only after receiving the same due diligence in preparation as the earlier post. The goal is to use the new-found worldbuilding skills and not simply to spackle over the earlier idea. So little effort would demonstrate the intent of having the community flesh out the idea for you, requiring closure of the question.

Abuse: Querents who abuse this tag by requesting frequent idea reviews, notably but not exclusively in a perceived effort to have the idea fleshed out for them, shall first be warned by the community, then warned by the Moderators, and finally have their account suspended or banned. The querent is obligated to complete their due diligence by completing their worldbuilding construct to the very best of their ability before asking for a review.

This tag has been created as a consequence of the Meta post Policy: Review-My-Idea questions are permissible. If there is a discrepancy between this wiki and that post, the information found in that post shall supersede this wiki. Should this occur, it would be appreciated if you would notify the Moderators that this wiki (or that policy) can be updated.

Additionally, this question type should be administered by the community with the following in mind:

Voting: users are encouraged to up-vote/down-vote RMIQs based on the quality of the question (how well it has been presented to the community) and NOT the quality of the idea. A low quality idea should have answers explaining its weaknesses, not down-votes. On the other hand, a well-explained question should be up-voted. Thus, voting for RMIQs should reflect the effort to seek the review and not the popularity of the idea.

Worldbuilding: The specific focus of this tag is NOT to help an individual to build their world, but IS to help them be better worldbuilders. Answers are therefore expected to explain worldbuilding concepts rather than point out weaknesses. It is anticipated that the majority of answers will want to focus on weaknesses, rather than celebrating strengths. However, the best answers will be those that help the querent understand the trade-offs associated with a weakness and the process of choosing between the trade-offs. Therefore, answers that instruct the querent (and, thereby, all future worldbuilders) should be up-voted while answers that simply point out a weakness should be down-voted.

Civility: It is the nature of reviews to critique, meaning it is anticipated that the majority of answers will be negative. While we admonish the querent to be prepared to have their proverbial baby called ugly, we also admonish respondents to great courtesy, respect, and civility. Ideas both good and bad are anticipated to have had a considerable effort put into them — and that effort should be recognized. The goal of RMIQs is NOT to tell people they suck. It IS to make them the best worldbuilders they can be. Knowing that this question type lends itself to a natural negativity and knowing that it's the desire of the community to build up rather than tear down, answers that fail to be civil will be under threat of deletion.

Please note that, in my opinion, a review-my-idea tag should be accompanied with a banner header noting that something special is happening in the same way that we emphasize the hard-science tag. That may not be possible, but if it is, it would be a good thing.

Disclaimer

My one and only fear involving this policy's approval is that it has the ability to be abused in the same way as the Anatomically Correct Series. The Stack Exchange against "mindless social fun" is still very much in effect, which is why I'm proposing the third bullet in the tag wiki — but I can see the same people who mindlessly post half-baked ACS requests over and over wanting to do the same with this policy. As much as I believe we should approve this policy, we must be sure we know that abusers will eventually be attracted to it.

Answer 1

Is this site about teaching its users how to go about building worlds, or doing the worldbuilding for them?

In my opinion, it should be as much of the first as the second.

Sure, we get a lot of 'Here's my problem... help me!' type questions that get some very good answers, but what about the 'Here's my solution, did I miss anything?' or 'Can I do this better?' questions?

That's the one problem I have with WB SE... currently it doesn't encourage a showcase of good worldbuilding, because where's the question?

I've tried over the years to post review questions in the guise of 'Did I miss anything?', such as Can 'prions' help me avoid a genetic engineering temporal paradox?, Is it reasonable that magic would become a subject and magi would become students in military academies in a world with rediscovered magic?, or Practicality of engine-mediated magic where I had what I thought was a good solution, but just wanted to make sure that I hadn't missed anything because I was too close to my solution.

I believe that we should allow review-my-idea (RMI) questions, because they will serve to show other worldbuilders what good - and bad - worldbuilding ideas look like.

As a caveat to this, we should encourage users to upvote well-explained RMI questions, even if they are bad ideas, since it is the answers that should show why they are good or bad. We should downvote these sorts of questions if they aren't explained in enough detail.

I also agree with JBH that this should not be an excuse for 'Here's a framework of my idea, help me fill in the details' questions. RMI should present the whole idea.

Answer 2

I am torn on this - on one hand, I believe excellent questions should be celebrated. People that have put in serious effort to their world building should, IMO, be treated with more leniency than someone who spends a few minutes going: 'LOL wouldn't it be cool if...'

And from that point of view, I think that absolutely this is a good question to be asked....

My hesitation though comes from the point of view of the Answers:

Yes, Looks good (or variations on this theme)

Do these add value to the site - do these answers add value to other people who might be trying to work through their own worldbuilding struggles

Frame Challenges of various hues and critiques of the idea

Someone points out a key flaw or overlooked aspect or similar - let us presume that both the question and the challenge are well-reasoned and good faith - does this type of answer add to other peoples world building struggles - Maybe.

I feel I could be convinced more on the latter part as being good for the site, as it allows for the creative interplay between askers and answerers. But I also feel that a good number of people who would engage in such a review my idea question - would be looking more for the former (validation that they are awesome) and I fear that if the only good answers are critical answers, it might sour the tag.

I am going to leave this here - I am ready to hear other opinions and other answers on this and be swayed by the community. I may even edit this answer subsequently based on others feedback.

Answer 3

The review(-ish) type content is not exactly new on the network. It is also not prevalent but look at some of our sister sites:

• Code Review - it is explicitly about broader review of a piece of code. While narrowly scoped problems ("I have this code, I need to achieve X with it") can be posted on Stack Overflow, more broadly scoped ("I have this code, I need it to be more idiomatic") are for Code Review.
• Software Engineering - will accept reviewing design before writing code for something.
• Role-playing Games - accepts reviewing custom made content for games (classes or specific sub-systems). See their How can I ask a good homebrew review question? and the homebrew-review tag.

Therefore, I think it safe to say while reviews are probably broadly not fitting into the network, they are definitely here with some caveats but still here.

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I agree that reviews of worldbuilding ideas can work. They have to be reasonably scoped, of course. Reviewing the entirety of Tolkien is definitely too big.

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My only other concern would be that such questions are inherently going to draw nitpicking. I expect it would be very rare that somebody would answer that the idea looks good as-is. Because by asking about an idea, answerers are inherently primed to try and find an issue. And if they find no showstopper, they would still feel compelled to point out irrelevant problems.

Designers and others who do any form of commission for clients are very familiar with that - you can create the perfect product for your customer and when the customer reviews it, they will feel compelled to point out "flaws" just because they feel it is expected from them.

Therefore, there should be a provision that focuses the review in some way. As inspiration, RPG.SE has this as the first rule for homebrew reviews:

1. State what you want to achieve, and why you want a review.

In order to give you feedback on whether your material is functioning well at its purpose, we need to know what that purpose is. Please also tell us if there's anything you're particularly worried about or looking to improve or fix.

As you share your homebrew, tell us:

• What it should accomplish, or what your aims for it are.
• If it's an item or class, what kind of power level you're going for, if such a concept applies to your game.
• If you're sharing a monster or challenge or obstacle, include who is supposed to be challenged by it, which might mean briefly informing us about the player characters if you're a GM. (Feel free to be specific to your situation.)
• To help others (and yourself) keep track of and differentiate the questions, please put the name and any key information (such as what option type it is) in the question title.