Should Politics SE be split into two separate stack exchanges?

Question

Should the Politics stack exchange be split into separate Liberal and Conservative stack exchanges?

This question isn't as facetious as it initially appears as Politics.SE belongs to a small subset of stack exchanges that are inherently ideological.

"Soft" stack exchanges are not a good fit generally for what was intended as a Q&A model for "Hard" or applied sciences, but ambiguity and grandstanding rhetoric are kept to a minimum on most of these ideological stack exchanges through one of two mechanisms:

1. Moderators stringently apply quality controls consistently across all content without fear or favour.
2. Everyone in the same stack exchange generally believes in the same thing. For instance, the Christian, Hindu and Muslim stack exchanges have civil content despite being quintessentially ideological; as the majority of their membership have similar values and post with honest intentions.

If we are not going moderate then perhaps the site should split into specific ideological camps so as to raise the level of conduct in each subsequent stack exchange.

Of course, this is unlikely to be workable with the Stack Exchange software after the fact, so the point I'm trying to make is moderate better.

_{N.B. Is this a rhetorical question? Yes it is - in alignment with 80% of content posted on this stack.}

Answer 1

I know a thing or two about Christianty.SE.

I can assure you we do not have homogeneity. We have very liberal and very conservative members. We have Baptists and Catholics. We have Mormons and Pentecostals. We have Atheists and Muslims. We even have arguments over whether "liberal and conservative" have meaning. But we've built a pretty solid basis of fact-based questions and answers that steer clear of "Truth," sermon, and/or cheese. As my keyboard shortcut says, when you get the chance, please check out our [about] and specifically How we are different than other sites. At some point, I'd like to make a version of that document for politics.

We work together to stop rants on either side, and we reward scholarship over speeches.

More importantly, however, we don't rely strictly on diamond moderation. We flag the heck out of stuff. To wit, I am not a mod there, and yet I've raised over 520 helpful flags- and less than 15 unhelpful ones.

Candidly, here on politics, I'm probably the biggest wuss of all the mods. I look for content to vote up, rather than trying to close everything in sight. But, I respond well to flags, because then I don't feel as though I am censoring people.

I agree, I could be a better mod- but Yannis, Sam, and I are not the only ones who are supposed to be moderating.

Want a better site? Help us.

• Focus on fact based questions and answers, and vote them up.
• Flag bad content
• Model good behavior by writing good questions and answers.

That will fix the problems you see and get us all the site we want.

Answer 2

I have two concerns with this proposal:

Firstly, for answers where liberals and conservatives are likely to give different answers, I would argue that there is value in seeing both sides' points of view.

Having separate sites could end up with both sides engaging in navel-gazing rather than heated debate, which I feel would be detrimental to all who come here with the hope of learning something.

Secondly, the terms "conservative" and "liberal" are not well-defined even within one country's political systems, let alone across national borders.

(For example, as a British observer of American politics, I get the impression that even our Conservative party would be regarded as liberal by the Republicans right now.)

Answer 3

There are separate SE's for each religion. I suppose there's a parallel there.

That said, if you were to split it, they'd be very different sites than I assume what was intended for this site.

I think there's enough partisan places on the internet to ask questions. Not sure if we need even more.