Here’s my two cents as a long-time contributor to the Photography site.
First, there are large number of perfectly wonderful discussion forums out there, many of them with help sections. It’s not useful to duplicate those. Having a curated source of expert knowledge is of value.
I’m not at all above helping newbies — this doesn’t need to be a rarefied expert-to-expert site. Photography as an art is growing like never before; as an expert-domain profession, it’s almost collapsed. Let’s gather knowledge and help make more experts (and capable intermediate photographers on a learning path).
At the same time, I’m not super interested in one thousand “what filter was this” questions (where the answer is usually “the thing you think is a filter is some combination of skill, setup, and standard post-processing”), nor by a bunch of “I don’t want to learn anything, I just want to buy something that makes my pictures better” questions.
But, to flip again: the SE site has been pretty stringent on turning away equipment recommendations. There’s good sense in this and it’s help us avoid the brand flamewars that plague other sites. But it’s also problematic because it leaves out a key “feeder population” of users.
And finally, we’ve always wanted more questions around the art and skill of actually taking photographs, and it’s been hard to attract those questions. The engine isn’t really well-suited for it, and often these don’t have a simple, straightforward answer.
I’m kind of thinking the problem is best served by breaking it down: different areas with different expectations.
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A knowledge-base focused area for learning about aperture and ISO and focal length and all that, plus standard lighting setups, techniques for posing a model, and so on — topics with definitive answers. This is different from Wikipedia because Wikipedia makes a good reference for many such things, but is often a terrible learning tool.
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An immediate-problem area for things like “what camera is right for me” and “what lens should I get to go on safari?” There may be some general advice which scales to everyone, but mostly the answers are personal (and not much use six months later).
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An area specifically for learning how to take photographs in a certain style, or techniques for covering a type of subject, and so on. This is sort of between the two: answers should be interesting to many people and educational on their own, but there’s usually not a “right” answer. This might even include a photo-critique section. On Stack Exchange, one problem we struggle with is unique titles for these questions; ideally, this could be organized visually by example images, with any title secondary.