Would it be helpful to have a Question Workshop thread?

Question

This idea is somewhat borrowed from puzzling.se's Riddle Sandbox and math.se's Draft Sandbox threads.

Would it be helpful or beneficial to have a thread on meta for posting question drafts as answers to receive help getting them stack shape before posting them on main?

Right now, when I want to trial a question before posting, I can only briefly describe my question in chat and then get some brief thoughts from those present. I would love to be able to format my full question as an answer here on meta and allow the community to leave comments and make edits as we work together toward a good question for main.

I think there are also some potential benefits for newer users here - it gives us a reason, and them an incentive to visit meta. It could be an opportunity to point newer users toward a place they can workshop their questions into good shape for the main site. I know we already try to do this on main, but getting users familiar with meta is a good thing, and this could be a good opportunity for that.

Answer 1

I don't think we workshop questions often enough to warrant a dedicated thread

The advantage to having a question workshop thread as I see it is if it is already done a lot and you need to condense it so as to not drown out other meta activity. We aren't exactly at risk of that happening at the moment.

And doing it without there being a major need won't accomplish much. Such a thread will probably do more harm than good if there aren't enough users engaging on it, and old meta threads simply don't get any significant attention. We aren't helping anyone if we direct their question to somewhere that will just gather dust.

On the other hand there is an option which you don't lay out in the question; you can workshop the question on meta. Ask a question on meta, state your problem, include a draft of the question, give your reason for thinking it might not work, and any other relevant details. This is often used as an escalation of the same process on main (generally because a comment thread has been shown to be insufficient). This isn't needed very often, for most questions comments are sufficient.

Is there something we can do to help question workshopping?

Well, it seems we could do a better job teaching our users it exists. Let's teach our current tool better, before trying to introduce a new one.

I've rattled ideas on this in the back of my mind since the last time we had to teach someone about question workshopping, and I suggest two simple tools; a guidance Q&A and a tag. The Q&A would be something we could point users to as part of suggesting they open a meta to make a question workable. The tag would primarily help serve as examples for how to do it (which I remember from last time was surprisingly tricky to find) as specific-question contains a lot of other stuff too.