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It was an amazing revelation to me when I found the Anatomically Correct Series.

I had no idea that series could be created like that, on this site. This type of organizational structure seems like it could be extremely helpful on a number of levels, so I tried searching for more 'series', but found very few (I expected many more since it seems like such a helpful concept):

Creating a Realistic World Series.

Great Lakes Earth Series.

Planet of the Aves Series.

Can we Build series.

Is there somewhere that all these series are linked to each other in a 'series' of their own? Like a library or encyclopedia? If not, maybe it should be started. Thoughts?

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I'm going to disagree with Tim B here.

I really am not a fan of "series", myself.

Sure, if you've got a bunch of questions you are struggling with in building a world, go ahead and ask them. That's not a problem, that's the entire purpose of the site.

However, it's usually a good idea to ask the questions one at a time, and incorporate what you've learned, or decided on, from one, into the next. Yes, it will probably take slightly longer than the shotgun approach; on the flip side, it will usually get you progressively better, more relevant answers.

But don't artificially tie them together. And yes, even if you're asking about the same world or universe, it can easily come across as artificial to other people.

If I come to the site looking for questions relating to, say, climate on large, arid continents, then I want that. If I'm an expert in climatology, then I want questions about that. In neither case am I likely to be particularly interested in the details of the life cycle of a type of fish in the ocean half way across the planet, even if it's the same planet, unless of course it somehow relates directly to the climate on that arid continent (which seems... unlikely).

If some other question is legitimately related, then link to it specifically; if you want to be helpful, at least provide a brief explanation of why the linked-to question is relevant. Please don't make readers go through a whole series, no matter how interesting you think the world described in them is, just to answer a question. Ultimately, you likely want to make it as easy as possible to answer your specific question, typically by putting all the information needed to answer the question into the question itself. Yes, this will likely lead to some duplication, but it also means that anyone interested in answering your question can start answering right then and there instead of having to read a dozen other questions while trying to pick out the important bits from each of those and keeping mental track of how they relate to the question they first came across.

Also, looking at the anatomically correct series in particular, that also has the problem that without "inside knowledge", the titles really don't say much about what OP is looking for. They usually discuss evolution of some kind of creature, but the person reading the question rarely gets to find out that that's the question being asked until the very end. I argued this back in February 2016!

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  • $\begingroup$ The question isn't about an individual asking all the questions they have. It's about consolidating existing resources, while revealing previously unknown possibilities. My personal example: I've been using this site for creating my environment. I haven't reached the point of populating the environment yet. I have ideas, but nothing developed. I stumbled on the anatomically correct centaurs, it was vaguely similar to some ideas I already have. Imagine my surprise when I found out that 8 questions in that series are also directly related to my other ideas. What a helpful revelation! $\endgroup$
    – Harthag
    Oct 3, 2018 at 13:49
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    $\begingroup$ If I see "anatomically correct" in the title, I assume that I know nothing about the question until I finish reading its entire text. The title never really doesn't tell me anything at all. Anatomically correct gods kinda takes the cake. $\endgroup$
    – Cort Ammon
    Oct 4, 2018 at 4:32
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I think you already did :) That's actually the full list so far as I know - the simplest way to build a directory of them would be to tag them all with "series" and then a search for the tag will find them.

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