Is Worldbuilding a What If Site?

Question

A few months back, my participation on this site dropped heavily for various reasons, most of them real life commitments. Now I've come back, and there's something I've noticed.

When I left, the site was filled with great stuff about worldbuilding. Information on specific topics, such as the making a map series, great discussion about how to make a world tick logically, or not logically in some cases.

On my return a month or so ago, and ever since then, it seems to me that the focus of the site has changed to being a more whimsical, what-if type of thing. More and more questions seem to me to be idea generation, which we have a close reason for.

Now, I don't personally think that's a good thing. We've lost the great worldbuilding we had going on in favour of hypotheticals to satisfy a curiosity. But it's not up to me. So, several questions for the community at large:

1. Do you think my observations are correct? Have you seen the same? Something slightly differently? Is Worldbuilding more what-if now than it was?
2. Should this be happening? This is the killer - is this a good or a bad thing? Do we want to be what-ifs and idea generations? Your opinions, please.

If this is the kind of thing we want to be happening, that's fine - but there are potentially some policies and functions around the site that could do with having another look at.

Answer 1

Yeah, I'd say we've moved from Worldbuilding SE to Whatif SE. I see three problems that need to be dealt with:

1)- External image. Our most popular questions don't actually seem to be about worldbuilding a lot of the time, so when people see them on the HNQ they get the wrong ideas. This goes hand-in-hand with the idea that popular questions should be left open because they are popular, and I disagree with it. You could ask the absolute best question ever, and it might still be off-topic for this site, so we should close it and see if it can be migrated.

2) - Lack of consistent understanding of the scope of this site. We have discussions like this often, and I feel like we never actually get anywhere. Every so often, I get really scared that every question I see is off-topic, but over time I've just given up because it's all "subjective" or "borderline". The way I see it, we should all be a little looser with our close votes; if people agree with you, they'll see the votes and add their own. If you're alone in your opinions, there'll be one downvote and the question will stay open. After doing this for a while, maybe we can get a better understanding of what people think should be closed. Plus, we should keep talking about this. Obviously there's a problem, we just need to figure out exactly what to do about it.

3) - We ARE the problem- I can say with complete confidence that I've asked some off-topic questions here before; we all have. But I think that's the biggest problem, and it bleeds into the other two: if new users come in and see 10k rep and up users asking bad questions, they'll think it's all right to ask bad questions of their own. We're about to graduate, we don't need to contribute questions to fill the void any more. I say those of us who are active in Meta and/or have a lot of reputation should be more careful with the questions we ask, because new users are usually going to end up asking worse questions than us, and if we want those questions to still be on-topic we have to make sure our questions are super on-topic.

Answer 2

I've been wanting to start a meta discussion about this too. Thanks for bringing it up.

I, too, feel that we're getting more of this type of question lately and that it's not good for the site. The reason I haven't mod-hammered more of these closed is that I'm confused about what the community wants -- we say that we're about worldbuilding, not plots or characters or idea-generation -- but people engage with these questions, often enthusiastically. These questions and their many answers get lots of upvotes and positive comments, and not as many close votes as I'd expect. This tells me that the community is divided.

The call on any given question is made more complicated by the fact that there's a spectrum here. At one end, a question about how to work out the orbital mechanics of a multi-mooned planet in a binary-star system given constraints A, B, and C is clearly on-topic. At the other end, a question that describes a multi-mooned planet in a binary-star system and asks for plot ideas set in that world is clearly off-topic. In between we get lots of fuzziness. Is a question about how to kill everybody overnight on-topic? What about a question about how AIs can do so? What about a question about the logistics of alien invasion given factors X, Y, and Z? What about a question about how society would have developed differently if earth had two moons? Binary stars? Double the land mass?

It's not that we've run out of the kinds of questions that used to be our near-exclusive fare; people are asking those too, in comparable numbers I think (anecdote, not data) but in smaller proportion as our overall volume increases. We were averaging 10 questions/day in November; today it's 20/day. That's significant growth, and perhaps we aren't as able to guide users as we once were. Let's fix that. First step: more-clearly describing the boundaries, making some good, clear meta posts about it, and updating our custom close reasons accordingly.

Answer 3

I've griped about this in the past, so I'm glad you've brought this up. I agree with a lot of what has already been said, especially in Monica's answer. However, I have a different direction I'd like to go in.

There are three types of questions. . .

After some thought, I realized (well, it seems to me, at least) that there are actually three different types of questions on Worldbuilding, and I've asked questions in each category.

1. What if . . . ? These are the kinds of questions that are at the center of this discussion. I would further subdivide them into two new categories:

   1. Random hypothetical thoughts. These are things that people may have thought up on the spur of the moment. They are generally not too closely tied in to a specific world. We get these from a variety of sources, mainly just people thinking about weir scenarios. However, some also stem from topic challenges and migrations. The former (topic challenge-based) are cool, and encourage asking questions in niche areas. The latter (migrated questions) are not, in my opinion, good. There is often no motivation to build a world at all. The reason we get these may be because of our external image, as DaaaahWhoosh wrote. I sometimes try to discourage these migrations on the science sites, but this is often unsuccessful.

   2. Broad questions about a world. These are ideas that come from worlds that are not fully fleshed out, but may be in the planning phase. The questions are often about some overarching property that sets the world apart from ours (if people were twelve feet tall, for example). There is generally not a lot of detail in these questions. However, they do have the potential to lead to good worlds. The motivation for worldbuilding is there.

2. Specific worldbuilding ideas. These are the questions I like best. These questions have several characteristics:

   • The world is well-though out.
   • Specific details are mentioned.
   • Other important ideas/information are/is included in the question.
   • The world is already being built.

   I like these questions, and we had many more of them (certainly by percentage, if not numbers) a long time ago, when the site was young. You can still find them around. In my opinion, these are the questions we should strive to ask and answer.

3. Meta-topic questions. These questions hide in a few related tags:

   • worldbuilding-process
   • worldbuilding-resources
   • shared-worlds

   and a couple others. These questions also may not have any of the tags. I find these questions very helpful, and I've used some that others have asked when building my worlds. I think we should also have these.

What do we want?

This meta discussion is, as I have said, about questions in the first part of the first category. I'll be explicit, and say that we should no longer allow these questions. Questions of the second "What if . . . ?" type may be fine, so long as they aren't too broad, opinion-based, etc.

There are, of course, some downsides to this:

• Lower site participation.
• Fewer questions.
• Fewer questions on the HNQ (and these What if? questions often get on the HNQ, because it's easy to answer them).

The upside is simple: A site that's actually about worldbuilding. Is it worth the downsides? I would argue yes.

Enforcing it

If we do end up changing the scope as I've said, then we need to ensure that it's followed. I have a proposal that I think may help:

Show some effort!

A lot of sites on Stack Exchange expect askers to show some effort researching and trying to answer their own question. They should then provide some details of what they know and what they've found, and what they don't know and haven't found.

We can use a modification of this: Namely, to require askers to show that they have a clear, specific world in mind and have spent time developing it. This will hopefully dissuade many of the "random hypothetical thoughts" I talked about earlier.

Here are some sample details:

• The name of the world's lands and the people.
• The technological and social era at the time in question.
• Any developed language (possibly relevant).
• A map, if possible.
• A short history of important events in the world.
• A description of the world's culture.

Clearly, it will not be possible for everyone to provide all of this information. However, I suspect that it will lead to better thought-out questions and better worlds.

---

Random unrelated thoughts:

• DaaaahWhoosh is right; a lot of us high-rep/high-activity users are culpable here. Some of my recent questions have been directed towards a specific world I've been developing, but many are questions in the first category - some of which are random thoughts and some of which are about infant worlds that are not well though-out. It is up to us to set a better example here.
• We need more meta-worldbuilding questions. These are incredibly useful to people, and they will help in the long run.
• Kudos to anyone who read through all of this. It's a bit extreme insofar as I'm proposing banning many questions that make Worldbuilding Stack Exchange popular, and it's not concise. But I appreciate anyone who reads it all in full and gives feedback.

Answer 4

I originally posted this on the case study question but the content makes more sense here in the general discussion.

Whenever we have conversations around what fits world building this answer from meta comes to mind, primarily this section:

For World Building, I feel that the answer might be:

"To a zeroth-order approximation, everything goes on World Building"

I think this is the rub, and we keep discussing over and over again, what is in scope and what is not...

Part of the problem is that all topics are on topic, I mean c'mon we are talking about the entire freaking universe, that pretty obviously covers everything. Which is not to say that all questions belong here, just all potential topics.

I am also not suggesting that questions should not be closed, because obviously that would just make the site a dumping ground for a lot of garbage.

So...I don't think we can just say x is on topic and y is not, I don't think world building fits that paradigm.

Here on world building Forms of questions can be on or off topic.

---

Off Topic Stuff

• Plot/Idea Generation is off topic, we are not here to write stories for people. However we can help people confirm an idea would work scientifically or logically in their given scenario. This is where things get hazy in my opinion and in cases like this I tend to give a well asked question the benefit of the doubt and leave it open.

---

Assessing questions (If you only read one part of my post read this...please)

My general method, which I would suggest is a good one is to do this:

• Ask: Am I helping someone gain knowledge to build a world?
• Ask: Am I helping someone write a story

In a Yes, No situation no issues we are good to go.

In a No, Yes situation I vote to close

In a Yes, Yes situation I vote to close and suggest a way to rework the question to avoid the idea generation portion.

In a No, No situation I suggest deletion.

Answer 5

I wanted to answer @overactor's comment on Monica's post, but as the length grew, I thought it could make an answer on its own.

I regularly read: that question is fine because it is popular (in substance, but also sometimes literally). I remember back in July when we closed (one of) the most popular question on the site, because it was too broad. Why couldn't it be done now?

To answer the OP, I too sometimes have the feeling that many of the questions aren't from people actually trying to build a world, but are just curious. If that's in absolute not bad, the appeared predominance of those certainly made the previous approach for our scope somehow shaky.

We could simply say that whatever is popular with good answers, etc. fit the scope. That's a good way to get good stats, a lot of views and good participation.

However, I am more of the approach that we should discuss the scope on meta. See the closing reasons, are they still fine. What does that mean too broad, what does IG means, where does the plot building starts, where does the worldbuilding ends, etc. We've had those discussions before, but maybe it's time the newer users share their views on it.

And then once those discussion have taken place, they should be enforced, regardless of the popularity of a question, even if it might pain to close an otherwise interesting question.

On a concluding note, I think this is a debate that is sane, and needed, but it should be kept to after the election. Even if the candidates could give their views on the subject.

Answer 6

I feel like "what-if" is only a small set of the potential problems, and additionally many excellent worldbuilding questions are "what-if". The problem with what-if questions is actually a symptom of a larger problem rather than a root-cause.

What we need to do is define the "axis" (Risk factors?) upon which off-topicness can be measured and then set the threshhold for those risk factors. For example too individual, too broad, too plot, too writing-techniques, etc.

For example we could have a meta post asking for "things that can make something off topic".

Each answer to that is a single risk factor that can make it off topic (examples listed above) and we can up or downvote that thing as being relevant.

Once we've worked out which risk factors we care about we can then define the threshold for each risk factor and (if it doesn't fall into an existing close reason) do a custom close reason for it.

i.e. "too individual" would have a meta post describing what makes something too individual (describing actions of an individual character), what the threshold is, and suggestions for changes to make to correct that.

Answer 7

Ok, I will try to put down a defense on what-if questions, because, well, personally I think it is good way of asking questions here:

1. Some ideas are too big to begin with You get an idea for alien life form and at first point (my approach) you care about one thing about that aliens. You as an author are willing to hand vawe most of the attributes, but want one or more to be plausible.

2. To me (and seems that not just to me) it is natural way of processing new idea: I want to invent new bomb/poison/pill/device which goes poof and magically changes one attribute. What will be the consequences?

I want my aliens to live on planet which would be twice as big as Earth. What are the outcomes? And so on.

3. Seems to be better understandable all around the world: As non-English speaker myself, I feel the struggle of actually understanding what is being asked in the question. Again, in my case I get better understanding of questions in What-if format than in Solve for X questions.

However, I agree it is time to draw the line

In this specific example of a question, I caught myself thinking if the question is on topic. Personally I like it, I even upvoted on the question, but truth is, that such question is asking for a plot. And here is where I feel it is beginning to be a bad thing.

Good step forward is stop "plot" questions

I agree with ArtOfCode's observation: Community likes these questions (including myself), these questions get lot of attention, upvotes and answers. But I agree it is time to think if it is good in long run

Answer 8

I'll jump in here, even though I've got not much cred. (Somebody's got to bump up the curve, eh?)

Yes, this is beoming WhatIf.SE. And part of me thinks that's cool. But not the part that understands how the various SE work. It's great for the internet to have more than just Randall Munroe answering What Ifs, but its not great for WB.SE for this to be the place where it happens.

Why is it happening? I think it's an artifact of the WorldBuilders' incredible breadth of expertise. Here (it seems to me) questions get answered very quickly and (generally) with really high quality. The presence of objectively-high-quality answers and lots of upvotes and lots of traffic tends to discourage regulars and mods from closing, so scope has crept.

Why is this a problem? There are two reasons I see: (a) WhatIf isn't a great fit for the SE model; (b) diminishing value for worldbuilders! This has become a great site to come read some interesting questions and get really interesting answers. And the fit isn't so bad that it's obviously broken. But it's losing its focus as a place where authors, artists, even RPGers can aggregate wisdom on that topic.

For example, I've got a question brewing in the back of my mind for one of my (RPG) campaigns about how history and culture work in a world where sentient species have vastly different lifespans. (Think Tolkienesque humans, dwarves, elves.) But looking at the frontpage that question feels oddly out of place here....

What to do? Again, two thoughts:

1. Use close votes. I found my motivation yesterday with How deep underwater do I have to dive to be safe from a 1MT Hydrogen bomb detonation above? Interesting question (if you're into that sort of thing). Answers seem to bring expertise to bear. Popular, and generating traffic. But how is it remotely about worldbuilding? (And the only answer to that was "well, it's not, but it's interesting.") So I'm going to use my close votes much more. If four agree we'll start reining in the WhatIfs. (And we'll be prepared for a stream of "why was this closed as off-topic" meta questions, which will be a good thing for bringing more voices into the discussion.)

2. I think the obvious thirst for a WhatIf.SE site begs for the attention/input of SE higher-ups: "WB.SE is in danger of being overwhelmed by WhatIf traffic. The community has an urge to pull back its scope to traditional worldbuilding. But SE users clearly like asking and answering these questions, and they bring a lot of expertise to bear. It's just not worldbuilding expertise. Does SE want to host WhatIf.SE?" Can current mods bring this to the attention of our community representative?

Answer 9

Asked as a separate question: Case Studies - on or off topic?

Answer 10

I'll offer a rather extreme view (which I mostly agree with) for people to vote on:

It is happening, it is a problem and it needs fixing

I've also been less active over the past few months and have been visiting more frequently again lately and have the exact same impression. I'm often quite convinced a question should be closed, but am hesitant to do so because of the massive amount of upvotes and complete lack of flags or close votes.

The problem, in my view, comes almost entirely from the HNQ. Almost by design, questions that reach the HNQ are less in depth than the ones that don't. And HNQ is how we get most of our new users, so naturally, they'll ask questions like the ones that brought them here and vote according to the standards set by those. It's easy to see how this would result in a slippery slope.

What we should do

Our scope is rather mushy and it would be difficult to change that. Instead I think we should be very harsh with enforcing our mushy scope and do so immediately and retroactively.

New questions should be judged by high standards, regardless of their popularity. Older popular questions should be retroactively closed or locked to indicate to users that these are not the questions we want.

For the latter I would suggest making a Meta post to keep track of those questions.

What we should also do (but I'm conveniently not addressing because it is hard)

We need to define our scope more clearly. Unfortunately this is way more difficult than enforcing a scope.

Answer 11

I think saying something like "the site is now more of an [X] type of site" is a subjective generalization, and boils down to how many questions of the type you have in mind are being asked.

"Should this be happening?" Well, while I agree that more focused and practical questions may be cooler, it seems to me what we get is about what people ask. I do not think that what-if questions should be banned or closed or made off-topic just for being what-ifs. If a question is too wide open, yeah that's a problem for this format. But I think the thing to do about that is close/edit/moderate those bad what-ifs, and then encourage or lead by example with other types of questions.

In looking at the most recent questions, though, I see a series of questions that all seem, at least from their titles, to be problematic to me, all for the same reason: They all seem to be asking for a creative idea for an answer, and/or include the silly assumption that there would be one answer to the question. This would only mildly annoy me on a forum, but on StackExchange with its weird Q&A rules and moderation, it's extra-annoying.

What mental trait or combination of traits could make a race well suited to warfare?

How many can I think of or invent for you? Probably an infinite number.

What would people on multi-generational ships wear?

Clearly, pink polka-dot pajamas. Again, how many ideas can we list?

What kind of technology would be developed in the process of creating shapeshifters?

Hopefully this question has already done major work narrowing its idea of what shapeshifters are and what "technology to create" them would be in the proposed world. The wording ("would") bothers me. It's fantasy, so you make something up. Again, could be any number of things.

What would modern IT look like if Silicon Valley had been completely destroyed in 1985?

Argh. Again, it hurts my brain because it sounds like the OP thinks this might have one answer. But really, it's asking for alternate histories to be invented for one event.

What effect would a known but lost precursor civilization have on religion and philosophy?

I hope they have a specific one in mind, and they just need some detail figured out. Otherwise, this is not only calling for speculative imagination again, but probably with many points of unknown. I'm afraid to even open the question to see.

Even if these are all narrowly scoped in the details, the titles seem to me all problematic, because they all sound like the OP is asking for a general answer, as if there would be one. If I had a question about what people would be practical to wear on my specific type of multi-generational ships, I would word it more like, "What type of clothing would be practical for my particular type of multi-generational ships?"

Moreover, just that list of titles seems like it's going to inspire people to write more questions that are written like that, which does look to me like an awful problem. I don't know how you all feel about handling it, but if I had the time and energy and were editor, I'd want to write or point to a guideline about broad questions and how to make them specific and how to word them so as not to seem like they were crazy broad, and then edit the crap out of the existing titles so that they were about the OP's specific setting. Because otherwise, I think this will probably just spread.

Answer 12

I'll keep this short errr short-ish cough cough medium-long,
(Apparently bad @ short answers :D ).

I agree with:

• Too much plot asking (or leaning in that direction) does not fit
  (credit goes to various answers)
• Having various criteria show a clear balance in a non-world building direction is the best way to determine if a question is of topic
  (credit goes to @TimB)
• Waaay too broad
  (credit goes to @Dronz)

Having said the above, I emphatically believe it is very important for us to focus on changing the culture through as many non-modhammer-esque means as possible.
With aggressive closing a very last resort.

Justification
What we should care about is the average tenor of questions in aggregate.
It's the general feel of the site that matters!!
While we all agree the feel isn't quite right anymore, I believe the best fix is to mold the culture to something more fitting NOT add an aggressive close-hammer approach to the culture.

Over aggressive duplicate concerns, (despite the fact that Jeff Atwood said stop worrying about it), with a nearly belligerent smack down of 'evil' duplicates, seems to have irrevocably changed the feel & decreased the value of StackOverflow (from my view @ least).
It would be very disappointing to have the same experience here.

Possible Solutions (yep, failed @ teh short...)

1. Keep the fortnightly challenge (great name too) but clearly ask for world building related questions (and maybe even kindly ask users to avoid asking questions unless they are developing a world this applies to)
2. Possibly add another similar event, or string of events, in which users mention their most helpful world building questions here on meta (or wherever makes the most sense). e.g.: 'List the top two questions asked here on World Building that helped you develop a world.' OR 'List the single most valuable question you asked about a world you were developing' OR 'List the name of the user who you think gave the most useful World Building related answer in the last day'
3. Migrate to a more fitting site if @ all possible (too heavy on plot goes to Writers Stack Exchange... I actually don't know if there is anywhere for non-plot-but-not-really-world-building questions... but it would be best if we tried)
4. Only actually close a question, (add the last close vote), if the OP/question asker has been unresponsive to multiple pleas to change their question to be more world building related.
   If the user who asked the question is likely to go away from the experience of getting their question closed feeling positive, we win.

Also, not that my opinion matters much, but I don't feel that what if questions are inherently bad, they just need to actually be about building a world.