Greetings, all! As a newly elected/appointed mod with very little consistent activity here over the years (sorry about that), I've been dutifully reading up on policies, and have just succeeded in going through every single post on the V&V meta site. I'd like to share my findings and some comments/suggestions publicly, with pings to @Zanna @RobertLongson @Nic (Nic, what a fantastic job you did on meta, it's really noticeable!) but very keen to get feedback from anyone who may be interested.

First of all, I noticed a few posts from the early days of the site on types of veg*ism: Are subsets of vegan diets on-topic? and Are sorta-vegetarian diets on-topic? and What is considered to be vegetarianism?

My suggestion is to create a canonical FAQ thread listing ALL the different types of diets/lifestyles that this site covers (veganism, vegetarianism, pescetarianism, lacto-intolerance, etc. etc.) and keep that as a single resource that we can link to whenever necessary to clarify this aspect of our site scope.

Next, I bookmarked a whole bunch of questions related to scope (what types of questions should/shouldn't be on-topic here) and tagging, which I've collected into a spreadsheet. Let me post screenshots here from my Excel file. They come out small, but are clickable for full versions:

There are a lot of tag questions on meta (mostly thanks to Nic, again), but I've selected these ^ as the ones where either there was no consensus or the consensus hasn't been properly implemented, plus a couple of really useful informational ones like the map of related tags. Some of these may be worth going back to, especially on big issues like food vs diet and sports vs fitness. In my opinion, a clear tagging system is one of the hallmarks of a well-run site.

The scope questions, meanwhile, mostly don't require any new action or discussion - the reason I've collected these is so that we can use them to build a really good overall description of what our site scope really is, what can be asked here and what can't. (Getting a list of types of acceptable question will also help us to find good new questions to ask and increase the volume of content on the site.)

What can we do to avoid questions that will attract bad answers? - the answer from then-CM Jon Ericson, about avoiding ideology wars, has been much linked and quoted in later discussions. If "Insist that questions and answers be limited to a specific veg*n lifestyle" is something this site has actually consistently done (can anyone confirm?), I'd suggest making this a faq post.

What question types are we missing? relates strongly to my suggestion above of building a really good overall scope description. Once we know what types of questions are good for this site, we can more easily create new content faster.

Do you like the idea of an unresolved tag on Meta? is pretty much what I was thinking of while collating this whole list, especially the spreadsheets above. Maybe it would be helpful if I went ahead and added unresolved to a bunch of things, then we can slowly edit it out as we resolve some of these outstanding issues.

Let's update our on-topic page in the Help Centre again relates to my suggestion of building a good overall scope description. We can build it on meta and then put it in the help centre. Add related sites on SE to our FAQ for on-topic questions and Which sites on SE overlap most with Vegetarianism.SE? would also help with that.

Check out these dairy-free alternatives! is the start of another fantastic initiative from Nic to create curated collections on meta of useful related questions. That would be a great thing to continue, if we can. Again it would be helpful in seeing where good new content can be created.

So, yeah. That's what I've got so far. Long-term goal is to create a proper faq collection on meta, with things like "What types of questions are on-topic and off-topic here?" and "What types of diets/lifestyles are included here and what do these terms mean?" clearly listed and included. Then we should have a clearer notion of who we are and where we're going as a site, and - crucially - we'll be able to share that notion with new users by simply linking to a clearly defined FAQ.