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Allow a question to exist in multiple communities.
Occasionally, a post is a brilliant fit for multiple communities. Questions at Linux and Power Users are the most pertinent example, [1] but the decision to not create one for AOSP is, too. [2]
Reddit remediates this with cross-posting, which applies other communities' topics as tags to a post that fundamentally lives within one of them. This is a workaround at best, but the current status quo of having posts be of a hierarchical nature is worse.
Meta's Instagram and Facebook recently implemented a solution to an equivalent problem of theirs, by allowing an post to have been posted by multiple accounts, treating none as the ultimate owner. Although, in this case, QPixel's problem isn't ownership, the problem of organisation is identical.
Treating the community designations like tags might mean a reduction in duplicate questions.
1 answer
Merging communities loses their benefits
Although I can see that this suggestion is well intentioned, I believe that several benefits of having separate communities would be diminished or lost by having questions that exist across communities. I don't consider the same question asked in several communities (as separate posts) to be duplicates. Ideally the wording would be adjusted to better fit each community, but even with identical question wording the answers will be different in each community.
There is an answer to a closely related question "How to refer members of community B to a question in community A which suits both communities?", which explains this well.
In particular:
Even when a question can benefit from the point of view of multiple different fields of expertise, it's almost always the case that the focus of the question will be different between them.
The benefits of separation
I see 2 separate benefits to getting answers from a specific community:
- Answers will be from experts in that particular field.
- Voting will be from a community with that particular interest and background knowledge.
This means that not only will the answers be more tailored to the specific needs of that community, but votes will bring the answer that is most relevant to that field to the top.
If I have a question for which I want answers from 2 separate communities, having the question posted twice means that the top answer for each community will have a good chance of showing me what I wanted to learn from that particular group of experts.
The cost of combining
Posting just once and letting both communities vote means that the 2 types of answers I'm seeking are shuffled together based on votes from 2 communities with different areas of expertise, and the top answer is likely to only be the answer I was seeking from 1 of those communities, making it difficult to judge which is the best answer from the other.
Worse, in some cases the top voted answer may not be the best answer from either community.
- A specialist answer may get 10 votes from community A and none from community B.
- Another specialist answer may get 10 votes from community B and none from community A.
- A general answer that is not preferred by either community but can be understood enough to be voted on by both may get 6 votes from community A, and 6 votes from community B, giving a total higher than either specialist answer.
As answers to 2 separate questions in 2 separate communities, the specialist answers would go to the top of their respective questions. As answers to a shared question, neither of the specialist answers would be at the top, both being below the general answer.
Ask specific questions
I recommend posting your question in whichever community you want an answer from. If you want answers from several communities, I recommend asking several questions, tailoring each to the specific community to show what type of answers you are seeking.
This will keep both the answers and their ordering by votes more useful, both to you and to future readers.
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