New subcategory: rationale and scope posts 31–60
This is a continuation of a long topic, addressed by post number rather than by page. Start at post 1.
Scheduled maintenance: if the site is going offline for maintenance, advance notice will be posted here with the duration and scope.
The rare case here is the one that costs somebody a week, though, and the common case costs everyone ten seconds. I think the trade is clearly correct.
It is worth stating the boring hypothesis before the interesting one.
Fine by me. I had wanted a stronger conclusion and there is not one available.
Housekeeping announcement. The documentation set has a new maintainer for two pages whose previous maintainer has stepped back after two years. Both pages have been reviewed at handover rather than assumed current.
On new subcategory I would separate what is worth knowing from what is worth acting on. The first list is long and the second is short, and conflating them is how threads get heated.
Worth separating two things that post #33 runs together.
Checked the new subcategory claim against the primary source this morning. It survives, with a narrower scope than the version quoted here. Posting the narrower scope.
This follows post #37 rather than contradicting it.
Worth saying publicly: stepping back cleanly and handing over is a service. Documents with an absent maintainer go wrong quietly, which is the worst way for them to go wrong.
Not the answer, but possibly the question that gets there.
One question about the transition rather than the policy: what happens to topics that are in flight when it takes effect? The announcement is clear about posts and silent about drafts.
It reads as pedantry until the day it does not.
This follows post #38 rather than contradicting it.
New subcategory was covered in the wiki last year and the page has a review date on it, which is a better starting point than my memory of a thread.
Understood. Thank you for being specific about the limits of it.
Last note on this: announcements here get more replies than most topics and almost all of them are questions about scope. That is a hint about what an announcement should lead with.
The number people quote for new subcategory is a central estimate presented without its interval, and the interval is wide enough that the estimate is nearly uninformative on its own.
Picking up post #43: that is the part I would want checked first.
Two sentences on new subcategory and then I will stop, because the rest is speculation and the thread is better without mine.
What is documented is narrow. What is inferred from it is broad. The gap between them is where every argument here lives.
On post #44 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.
The edit is clearer. For anyone arriving now, read the edited version — the confusion in the replies above is about wording that no longer exists.
Filing this under things that are true until someone shows me otherwise.
I would be cautious about generalising from the new subcategory example above. It is a good example. It is one example.
A definition problem is doing most of the work in this new subcategory discussion. Once the term is pinned down I suspect the disagreement mostly goes away and what is left is small.
Collapsed as off-topic by two members at trust level 3 or above
Since new subcategory keeps coming up, it should probably be a maintained page rather than a recurring thread. I am happy to draft it if someone with more direct experience will review it.
Building on post #50 rather than restating it.
The rare case here is the one that costs somebody a week, though, and the common case costs everyone ten seconds. I think the trade is clearly correct.
Happy to be the one who is wrong here if it settles the question.
Everything in post #52 holds. The case it does not cover is the one I have.
I would call the community position on new subcategory likely rather than established, and I would be comfortable defending that hedge.
New subcategory is a question about a distribution, not about a value, and treating it as a value is what produces the confident wrong answers.
Post #52 and I disagree about the size of the effect, not about the direction.
Thank you for announcing it in advance rather than after. The number of places that do the reverse is remarkable.
Not the whole picture, but the part of it I can speak to.
No disagreement from me. Posting only so the question does not look ignored.
Practical answer on new subcategory, since the theoretical one is upthread: do the simplest check first, write down the result, and only then decide whether the complicated explanation is needed. It usually is not.
The rare case here is the one that costs somebody a week, though, and the common case costs everyone ten seconds. I think the trade is clearly correct.