- Value [1] Openness
- The sites are free and open to everyone - you can ask or answer questions without even bothering to register. Better yet,
you have access to the full archive of existing questions and answers - again, without needing to give up so much as an email
address.
- Value [2] Communities of Experts
- What's special about Stack Exchange? You wouldn't shout out a calculus question in a football stadium, right? You'd go to
the math department of a university. That's why instead of allowing questions on any topic, we bring together individual communities
of experts on very specific topics.
- Value [3] Clarity
- We welcome questions that are clear and specific, representing real problems that you face; Stack Exchange is not the place
for conversation, opinions, or socializing.
- Value [4] Specificity
- Value [5] Critical Mass
- We don't open a site until we're sure there's a critical mass of experts ready to participate. If you can't find a Stack Exchange
site for your area of expertise, you can propose one on our Area 51 site - if enough of your peers sign on, we'll create it.
- Value [6] Professional Communities
- Stack Exchange's focus on professional communities and real-world problems results in over 80% of questions getting great
answers, fast.
- Value [7] Real-World Problems
- Value [8] Quality
- Value [9] Rapid Response
- Value [10] Community Moderation
- We believe deeply in community moderation. That's why we appoint Pro Tempore Moderators and, ideally, democratically elected
community moderators for every site in our network. But what do community moderators do? The short answer is, as little as
possible!
- Value [11] Community Power
- From the very first version of Stack Overflow faq way back in mid-2008, our goal has always been to give power back to the
community: Stack Overflow is run by you! If you want to help us run Stack Overflow, you'll need reputation first. Reputation
is a (very) rough measurement of how much the Stack Overflow community trusts you. Reputation is never given, it is earned
by convincing other Stack Overflow users that you know what you're talking about.
- Value [12] Reputation
- Value [13] Self-Regulation
- We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost
of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users. Specifically, per the
reputation privileges: * Users with 15 rep can flag posts. * Users with 500 rep can retag questions. * Users with 2,000 rep
can edit any question or answer in the system. * Users with 3,000 rep can cast close and open votes. * Users with 10,000 rep
can cast delete and undelete votes on questions, and have access to a moderation dashboard. * Users with 15,000 rep can protect
posts. * Users with 20,000 rep can cast delete votes on negatively voted answers.
- Value [14] Human Exception Handling
- Even with active community self-regulation, moderators occasionally need to intervene. Moderators are human exception handlers,
there to deal with those (hopefully rare) exceptional conditions that should not normally happen, but when they do, they can
bring your entire community to a screaming halt -- if you don't have human exception handling in place. The most common moderator
task is to follow up on flagged posts. Every post contains a small flag link, which anyone with 15 reputation can use.
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