How do we handle standardizing things?
Code golf, being about exploiting things, often brings about many questions about edge cases. Since we don't want each challenge to have to deal with all problems again and again, it makes sense to standardize some defaults for questions about various topics (including, but definitely not limited to, what's a valid answer, what are allowed I/O rules, what's a quine, a program, a language, etc).
Codidact has help topics, customizable by moderators, but we still need some way to create the standards in the first place.
Proposal
Meta gets a new tag, named "standards" (or "defaults"; if you have name suggestions, suggest them!), addable to questions by moderators.
Such meta questions discuss a single topic, with each answer being a separate suggestion. Depending on the type of question, either the best voted answer is the accepted standard (e.g. quine definition), or all answers above some certain threshold of votes (what specifically should that be?) is counted as a default (e.g. a single input or output rule, as there can be many).
Since it can be useful to post answers with the express intent of them being downvoted to signify that something is not acceptable, the answers on these questions shouldn't give reputation, if possible.
These posts could, afterwards, be linked in the help pages, tag descriptions, or wherever else applicable.
2 answers
This sounds like a great idea to me. To summarize how we can move forward on this:
For the Codidact Team
- Create a new meta tag (defaults? name pending) that is one of the options for the required tag on meta
- Create a new post type that applies to all posts and answers on posts with this tag that awards no rep for votes (and doesn't affect stats like sum of received votes)
For the Community
- Once the above is done, start creating rules topics!
- Some examples of good ones to start with (examples from SE) are I/O rules and loopholes
For moderators
- Once these posts exist and have enough answers, summarize them into help topics for the site.
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Update: the meta tag is live, so we can start the posts. I have created a few here with a few sample answers, but the rest is up to the community! Make sure to vote on other answers as well as post your own.
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