What the scope of Worldbuilding is NOT about

Question

... taking any question that isn't accepted elsewhere.

This should be a reminder, or refresher.

These days, there are many questions about trying to set objective and clear limits for the scope of the site. But then, yesterday, I read that comment from a user from another site:

Such questions based on hypotheticals aren't really a good fit for Stack Exchange sites, as they're not likely to be useful to anyone else, and there isn't a ground-truth that can be examined when clarification is required. There is one exception: Worldbuilding is designed for such questions. If you want, flag this question for moderator attention, and we'll migrate it there.

It was on a question that got migrated to us. I have nothing against that particular user, I don't know them. But I'd rather like not to see such comments again. I know we are awesome, and we have some local specificities. Like, for example, we are more lenient than many sites with verbosity. We usually enjoy it even. Nevertheless, Worldbuilding is part of the StackExchange/StackOverflow Network (SEN). As such we follow the general definition that questions should not be open-ended, too broad or opinion-based.

A hint, if your question is too broad or insufficiently specified in your site, it probably also is in ours.

But the problem goes further. The last days, I have seen a few comments like

This question is sort of off topic for this community , it may be better if you ask at the physics stack exchange

Again, nothing against the user. Again, I don't know them. But, there are 152 sites within the SEN. Many have overlapping topics. An Anime of Science-Fiction or Fantasy would be on-topic both on Anime.SE and SFF.SE. Heck, if we talk about the Chronicles of Lodoss, it might fit in RPG.SE as well. For programming questions you have to choose between 4 or 5 sites. That does not make any of them less interesting.

So that's the same here. We don't want to close a question because it would be on-topic somewhere else. That might, or might not be. But this isn't our problem. The user chose to ask the question here, we should discuss whether it is on-topic here.

We shouldn't deny our users to answer a question just because someone else might take it.

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Those two actions tend to the same thing, reduce the overall quality of questions here on worldbuilding. We don't want to collect questions that no-one else wants while sending good questions away. We should all actively support our new moderator team in ensuring that we keep a good quality of questions. And that even if the questions were on-topic somewhere else, people like to ask it here, because of our unique approach.

Answer 1

Let's say a question was using tags that didn't match its question. Someone would probably go in and change the tags, so that user's question could attract the right kinds of answerers who will know the answer.

So I say, if we're not afraid to retag a question, why is it so wrong to migrate it?

We aren't at war with the other sites in the SE network; I like to think that we're all just different sections of a growing database of knowledge, available to anyone with access to the Internet.

The problem, though, is that the Internet is big. I mean really big. If someone asks a question that has a difficult answer, the person who's qualified to answer it might not regularly check this site. So, just like tagging questions, we try to put questions in places where we think the right people will see them. As a corollary to this, I would say that people on this site who can answer questions about things other than Worldbuilding shouldn't just lurk here. Go out, look on other sites, share your knowledge in the places it is needed most. Many of our top users already do this; if we're willing to share users, why can't we also share questions?

I think the unvoiced fear that many people have here is that Worldbuilding doesn't have a scope. We're worried that if we give up questions to sites that can answer them better, then we won't have any left to answer here. I don't think that's true, but even if it is I don't want to hoard good questions, keeping them from finding the right answers just so we can limp along pretending to be something we're not.

In fact, maybe the reason people think we're the catch-all site is because we never prove them wrong. They throw questions into us and never get anything back. If we start giving them questions that we don't think belong here, maybe they'll start realizing that we do have a scope, and they'll think twice about sending bad questions our way.

I don't know, these are just my thoughts, I think I only tangentially refuted your argument. I agree with the first part, I just completely disagree with the second.