I wanted to try to make something of a positive statement about our definition and scope, since admittedly it can be somewhat difficult to get your arms around. It was certainly difficult enough for the earliest involved to wrap their heads around the proper delimitation of scope for a "Philosophy" Q&A community. It took several weeks of discussion and several more months of trial-and-error before something like well-established borderlines were drawn. Through these adaptations, our community's definition, as you can imagine, had mutated somewhat from the original proposal. The biggest lesson from that time that I took away was the following:
We are here to learn -- not to vent, bully or distract. We have a shared ethos with Wikipedia for a reason. It's really important that content is formulated from a neutral point of view. This dramatically increases the quality of contributions, but also speaks to the basic foundations of our community -- that we're here for education, not here to impose our views on others.
None of this is to say that debate and discussion aren't encouraged -- but they need to express themselves through the Q&A process, and find clear, contextualized, neutral ways to express problems. The chat and meta spaces exist to support this process: to help develop ideas and understanding so that more effective and interesting questions can be posed and answered.
It might be helpful to keep in mind the context. We are not a community of philosophers, or an academic enclave. We are a group of students and teachers of philosophy collaborating with an American corporation (StackExchange); and while part of their corporate vision involves providing open and free educational resources, another part of it is profit. StackExchange bootstraps and maintains the system, and their rules are the rules. While they grant us a liberal degree of operational autonomy, there are boundaries.
The most productive way to think this to me is that, for better or for worse, we are SE's "philosophy" working group. The best and most constructive use I think we could make of the resources provided would be to use them to organize a generative and effective machine. To a large degree this has been done by the community itself with little overt guidance.
So what's the scope of the site? We've touched on it here already; and the scope of the site has been put forward here on meta in a few different places already -- this isn't anything new, but just what I hope might be an easy way to think about it.
Our goal is not to create new concepts, to "play philosophers"; our goal within the context of the main page is to behave like responsible students and teachers of philosophy. Which just means: asking questions that arise during the study of philosophy; answering with an appropriate degree of clarity, depth and rigor that hopefully spark interest in the discipline.
Our scope is involved with the context and motivation of a concern -- and perhaps the most trivial way to demonstrate theoretical context is to connect the question to a text or thinker, serving to indicate at least a minimum of topical research and reflection. (This can of course be done without recourse to another thinker or text, but will naturally need more explanation of the motivations of the concern to demonstrate topicality.)
In the style of the FAQ: you should only ask questions that are practical, answerable ones that you run into while studying philosophy. Answers should address the question directly, with rigor and depth. Both should be framed in clear and neutral language.
