Yeah, I'm not afraid of such questions. We can just point the asker to Yahoo Answers and be done with it.
But how do you justify to someone interested in Mormon mythology that questions about their flavour of christianity are off topic, but every other flavour of christianity is on topic?
Right now, my solution is this: Don't worry about it until at least a handful of actually crap questions appear. For all we know, they might never appear and we are all wasting our energy for nothing.
Also, it will be a lot easier to define our scope if we have actual examples to look at.
it should be relatively easy to deal with fiction/religion questions if only because there are loads of great SEs to migrate to; it almost doesn't matter where exactly we choose to draw the line
as long as we include folklore, which I don't think is on-topic anywhere else right now, I think it'll be fine
Yes. It would have been so much easier for Programmers to solidify its scope if The Workplace was around three years ago. We are lucky, the religious sites are not only around, but most of them are graduate sites.
@YannisRizos Actually, only two of six are graduated. Those two are Judaism and Christianity, and the other four are Biblical Hermeneutics, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.
Ra is just type of being so it doesn't refer to specific being, so I guess it can vary, as there are many Ra's. This is just my opinion. — kenorb42 secs ago
I know that a couple months ago, they were still having issues with members proselytizing and soap-boxing.
Christianity had and still has that problem too, but we have a community that actively squashes such questions and answers. Islam doesn't have a large enough community that does the same.
@HDE226868 You remind me a lot of Doorknob actually, though you're a few years older
@El'endiaStarman I'm a little surprised that the sites about Indian religions don't have enough traffic to graduate. There certainly are enough people from that part of the world on StackOverflow
@YannisRizos Do you think my answer actually answered your Ra question? By the end of it I began to worry I was talking too much about the creation of the world and not about specifically Ra.
Took me an hour to do all the research though. I could have copy-pasted wikipedia but I wanted to trace back all the sources (some of them were really terrible)
In related news, there's some outrage that Network Engineering is going to get a site design while Code Review doesn't even have one... and Bicycles does.
CR and Code Golf were always considered experimental. When I asked about CR's graduation couple of years ago, a SE employee told me that it might never graduate (although it was clearly a very successful site even at the time). And that makes sense, it's not exactly a Q&A site.
Sort of. Also, the discussion I mention above was informal. I'm pretty sure Jeff Atwood left a comment about CR's experimental nature on Meta.CR but - of course - the sites are down right now and I can't find it.
Regardless, since they announced graduation, they should have graduated the site by now. Or at least post a follow up explaining the delay.
@HDE226868 Don't know about that, but ChrisF's fifth diamond did break the system. It was something extremely minor that I don't quite remember now, but still.
What are tags for? They serve two purposes:
To aid in searching
To serve as guidance for brand new users to write good questions
The former is of only marginal use here; since the mythology itself is off topic, there will never be that many questions on the subject that are on topic.
However...
We should avoid tags for works that are not sources of mythology.