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The following question got moved to meta: "Would it be possible to create an open source software library, entirely developed and moderated by an open community?"

It contains the following two sub-questions:

  1. Has anything like this been attempted before?
  2. Are there platforms better suited for this?

As neither the main question, nor the sub-question have got anything to do with meta, it evidently got closed here.

I personally find I always take care of explicitly stating the questions I want answered. The title of this question is "Why did this non-meta question get moved to meta?", meaning, that is my question.

They always taught me it is good practice to end an email/letter/question explicitly with the question you want answered. In this case, I'm also interested in the following.

  1. How could I have better formulated my question(s) so they would have been better understood?
  2. Could this question please be moved back to programmers where it belongs so I can at least vote to re-open it there? Re-opening it here doesn't make any sense.

Excuse the sarcastic nature of this question, but you might understand I am slightly frustrated with how this question got down voted/closed as I sincerely tried my best to formulate it clearly.

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    Although I strongly disagree with the question getting migrated on meta, just a small suggestion to avoid such confusion in the future: One question per question. That way it'd be easier to get quality answers, and questions won't get downvoted / closed because of some parts of them. I'm not saying they won't get downvoted / closed, but when that happens it'd be for the whole question.
    – yannis
    Nov 16, 2011 at 21:38
  • @YannisRizos: In this case I believe it was the example which was confused as a question, as in Mark Trapp's answer. Taking this into account I edited the question even further to clearly separate the two. I would argue exactly the opposite, it is important to be very specific about what it is you are actually trying to get an answer too. This is also stated in "How to Ask".
    – Steven Jeuris
    Nov 16, 2011 at 21:45

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Just to be clear, five regular community members voted to migrate your question, not moderators. If I was a betting man, it was because of this:

You don't know whether an idea is any good until you try it, so I decided to create an Extension Methods proposal on Area51. I belief with proper moderation, it could be possible for the site to be more than a Q&A site, and that an actual library (or subsets of it) could be extracted from it.

  1. Has anything like this been attempted before?
  2. Are there platforms better suited for this?

It reads like you're asking for feedback for your Area 51 proposal. That's not on-topic on Programmers: at best, it's a meta discussion topic (but to that point, not a meta discussion topic here). If you're looking for feedback about an Area 51 proposal, you want to participate directly in the process on Area 51, not here.

I've reversed the migration (you can find it again in its original location), but your question as written has confused enough community members about what you're looking for so much that they migrated it here: it's not clear what you're looking for or how it's on-topic for Programmers.

While it might make sense to follow the business correspondance format for petitioning a company or a public servant, when writing questions, you want to get right to the point and do two things:

  • Explain what the problem is
  • Ask a specific, answerable question that will solve the problem for you.

For more tips, I suggest taking a look at How to Ask, which contains a few links to other guides about asking great questions.

But beyond that, open-ended feedback and recommendation requests might make great discussion topics (which is why a meta discussion site like here or Area 51 is everyone's first thought), but they're not the type of question that works well or has a home on the main Stack Exchange sites.

Additionally, even specific questions about development tools are not on-topic here: for that, you want Stack Overflow. But reposting your question there will certainly get it closed again: you need to ask a specific solvable problem, not ask for feedback about an idea.

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  • Thank you for your feedback, I updated the question in an attempt to address this issue.
    – Steven Jeuris
    Nov 16, 2011 at 21:18
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    @StevenJeuris I reversed the migration, but left the question closed: you'll want to update it there. While that addition might've prevented the migration to meta, it doesn't make the question any more constructive or on-topic.
    – user8
    Nov 16, 2011 at 21:20
  • Thank you! One more thing, probably a lot of the comments in the question should be removed (including my own) in order to prevent a continued discussion of the actual proposal here on Programmers.
    – Steven Jeuris
    Nov 16, 2011 at 21:48
  • @StevenJeuris It's probably best if you flag the comments you think are obsolete: I removed some of them, but I'm not sure amongst the others what are resolved and what aren't.
    – user8
    Nov 16, 2011 at 21:55
  • K, I see the difficulty in making a proper selection of which ones to keep and which ones not. It became a mess. :) I might have flagged one too quickly, but the important ones are the references to the xkcd comic now that it is removed. (great improvement btw, I'm considering of removing my down vote ;p) The Code Review comments should stay IMHO as they are valid comments on 'Has anything like this been attempted before', and valuable feedback.
    – Steven Jeuris
    Nov 16, 2011 at 22:13

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