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This site is for questions about building worlds, not questions about how others' worlds work. Now very few ideas are completely original, so your world might use elements from, or derived from, other worlds, but there's a key difference: If you ask "how does a lightsabre work in Star Wars", the only authoritative answers come from the Star Wars canon. If, ...
27
Same Answer, Different Tag
My answer for this tag is basically the same as for the other tag: sex is simply part life and part of culture (even more so than torture). Every life form that reproduces sexually is oriented towards engaging in the activity with the end goal of making more of its kind. Rational beings also infuse sex with large amounts of ...
24
Sadly, the text on Area 51 is woefully out of date on this point. The shortest time to graduation for any SE 2.0 site (that is, all but the few oldest) was six months and that was a while ago. On average it takes about two years, with some sites having been in beta now for close to four years.
My understanding is that SE will let sites linger in beta for ...
18
As Monica has already pointed out, the information on Area 51 is woefully out of date. (Great phrasing, so I'm borrowing it.)
When could we hope to see this site released?
The site is already released. It's here, there's activity (plenty of it!), and more than one of the higher-ups seem to feel that we are taking on a difficult type of subject matter and ...
16
Back It Up! can mean real-world history or physics or linguistics
These are valuable fields that can give a fictional world a sense of realism, or at least credibility and verisimilitude. Answers that reference these things are often going to be better than those without them.
Back It Up! can mean extrapolate from reality
Yes, many of us want to build worlds ...
16
I think I need to challenge the entire premise of this question.
I don't care if your question is about Star Wars, Star Trek, The Forgotten Realms, or something completely out of your imagination.
I care whether you are:
Building a world
Building a world
Building a world
That's it. Is your world based on Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkien? Etc. That is ...
15
Welcome to the site,
No, there is no hard and fast requirement that you be in the midst of building your own world to participate. If you have an area in which you are knowledgeable and can help answer questions all the better. If you played some game or read some book and had a hypothetical question come to mind that can be good info as well.
As long ...
15
I don't see any reason why a question based on a movie couldn't be on topic. In fact, I'm fairly certain that we have plenty of those, if for no other reason then because someone saw something they liked in a movie (or novel, or other work), want something similar in their own world, and want to better understand either how it could have come to be or the ...
14
Yeah, the synonym-suggestion interface really doesn't work well on most sites. First, there's the problem you brought up. Second and possibly more important, even if you do manage to suggest a synonym, people who can vote on it will never see it unless you publicize it. Yes, there's a page people can visit -- but who does? Even reviews can be hard to get ...
13
I've been seeing a lot of those too. I'm not sure what to do with them. They remind me a lot of the questions we see on physics like "Why do photons have wavelengths?" The only true answer to these questions is "because they do," or perhaps to question our entire model based scientific approach from its roots. But most of the time it's because someone ...
13
I think the general rule should be to avoid gratuitous or unnecessary images. Does the image really add something relevant or is it just noise?
If the image is just noise feel free to edit it out like any other noise.
We may be a little more relaxed than some of the more technical sites, but some of the lessons learned there will still work here.
In this ...
11
My opinion on this event is fairly simple and straightforward:
I think we too often rely on Science As We Know It to be the end-all be-all of measures by which we view, critique, understand, and answer every question in this forum.
We have a lot of very intelligent, very science oriented (science almost to the point of dogmatic faith) people here and it's ...
10
We have had questions that deal with sensitive topics -- rape, torture, genocide, and more. The topics aren't inherently offensive (though they require delicate handling), but the way a question is asked can be offensive.
It's hard to answer your question without a real example. You can ask about topics like an alternate history where the holocaust was a ...
10
This is a very good point. Most of the questions I've seen so far are just that. Questions instead of problems. Including those problems could help narrow many of those "too broad" questions down to "just right" size. It might be worth making that point on any question that isn't - for lack of a better term - bite size. After all, we want to make sure the ...
10
It is harder to write good questions about culture, politics, and other qualitative issues, but there are plenty of them on WB. As someone who has written 3 questions and seen two of them closed for being too broad (I edited one enough to reopen), I feel your pain. But the problem isn't that the site is bad, but that its mission is more narrow than you or ...
9
I agree that this kind of thing is really annoying (though I've probably been guilty of it myself in the past). SI units are the most common ones in science, and given that most of the familiar constants are best known as their SI unit values (e.g. the value of $c$ is ~ 300,000,000 meters/second), I think that they are our best choice.
Either way, ...
9
You've put together a complex story, you're proud of it, you've come here requesting help on Part A. Someone tears apart your story on Part B. The downsides of this are:
It can be very demotivational. You've put a lot of effort into this. "THERE'S NO WAY THIS COULD EVEN HAPPEN! DO YOUR RESEARCH!" would feel like a gut punch.
It discourages concise ...
9
If the question doesn't specify the expected direction of answer, it's reasonable to infer from what information there is.
The Sea of Japan question doesn't specify any level of future tech, alternate reality, magic, etc. In fact, it could have been written for the Engineering stack. Since the question talks about a real-world country with a hypothetical but ...
9
I am UNANIMOUS in offering a raspberry to anyone from Corporate who tries to lord their authority over any community whose foundation is free interchange of ideas & speech within the limitations set forth by said community, and so am going to stand with JBH's proposal to define Worldbuilding's statement on self policing.
Caveat No. 1: defining "too ...
9
As the person who asked the question I thought it might be worth putting in my two cents on the whole issue.
In general, I tried to keep the question as clinical as possible and about as erotic as a middle school sex ed. presentation, and avoid explicit language whenever possible. I.e., a strictly "just the facts, ma'am" approach. I actually looked ...
8
It depends, and it's necessarily vague.
Suppose a site's community, via meta, voted overwhelmingly to, say, outlaw question closure. That would be interesting, but it wouldn't change anything. At the other end of the spectrum, if a site's community votes to change the name of its chat room, or to define a tag synonym, or to reopen a question, there's ...
8
offensive contents that have a meaningful purpose in a question
I think the key to this lies in your definition of "meaningful purpose"...
Yes, some topics are inherently more controversial. Politics being one of them. But often the difference between offensive and non-offensive is in the intent.
Is the poster bringing up the topic purely to incite?
Is ...
8
To be frank about it, yes. There are a certain cohort of people on this site that have their heads so far up their tails they're at risk of recursion. Yes, there are some generally self-righteous commentators who pull apart an answer or question they don't properly understand and seem to troll the site more than provide any real value.
But in all fairness, ...
7
First, we are not to a consensus yet (at least not so far as I have seen). We are looking through the case study threads to figure out where the lines are. I will agree that there seems to be a consensus that there is an issue...just not what it is and how to fix it.
Second, I disagree that this is a problem for the moderators to manage themselves. We ...
7
As long as the answer does not require you to provide information from cannon to be correct, it is fine. Also, if the question requires you to understand cannon for context, it should be something that can be simply looked up without requiring an in depth understanding of the source material. In the case of the OP's example, we do not need to understand ...
7
I’d edit that down:
Consider waiting 24-48 hours before selecting the best answer to allow our world-spanning community a chance to contribute.
Short and to the point. Doesn’t judge those who disagree. Makes the case nicely.
7
I see that the Sea of Japan question has received frame challenges in nearly every answer. Perhaps Elementilas' is the exception.
But I think that it is a natural response, not to the fact that the question asks about something fanciful, but to the fact that the question is only one paragraph long and doesn't show any research. It also doesn't give any ...
7
I find the wording of the following statement self contradictory
We will answer questions involving the physiological aspects of torture and execution with one, overriding limitation: we will not explain how to cause pain.
When it comes to torture, I don't see how one can explain the physiological aspect without also explaining or implicitly suggesting how ...
6
On reading the edited question, I think it's an important issue. I'll rephrase, in case I don't understand the question.
I don't think this is really about the "impossible" situation or proposal, but rather about fishing.
In your view, we are seeing a good many questions posed thus:
Given X conditions that differ from our own known situation, would Y ...
6
As you mentioned, a lot of these types of questions are not really asking any question which has a real answer. Instead, they are asking "I'm having writer's block, so could you please load your idea shotgun and fire a bunch of ideas at me." They are asking people to write their story for them.
I still remember when I came across my first few of those kind ...
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