Codidact is obviously inspired and motivated by SE, but it’s not meant to be a clone. One of the risks of reducing things to “like SE” instead of actually specifying what we want is that we’ll inadvertently carry along SE baggage that we don’t want. Some differences we’ve already identified:
- Scoring/ranking of answers will be different.
- We are discussing optional public votes as a mechanism for experts to weigh in easily.
- We either won’t have or will not prioritize a reputation score.
- Privileges will be earned based on (specific) activity, not just on reaching a certain rep level (even if we have rep).
- Our approach to comments/discussions/feedback will be different. There will not be a separate chat system, at least for discussions on particular posts; whatever we do will be integrated.
- We haven’t specified question closure yet and it might be different. We probably will not “bake in” global close reasons but instead allow communities to decide what they want.
- We haven’t discussed whether we’ll even have badges, let alone for what.
- We probably won’t have bounties because without rep how would you fuel them?
- We will allow a lot more per-site customization than is available on SE.
Thanks for the specific feedback; that helps. To respond to a few things you raised:
I’ve been assuming there’ll be a UI design that fleshes out the functional requirements into a design proposal, and then after review that’ll be refined into something detailed enough to implement from (pixel-perfect or detailed wireframes or whatever the developers need; I’m not a UI person so I don’t know).
We’ll definitely need an API, which is completely unspecified right now.
On the data dictionary, some of the back-end/DB folks are working on devising a schema design, so that’s coming. It’s pretty central; we need it early.
Paging: good catch; yes we want that.
Thanks again.