Introduction question?

Question

I saw this site listed in HNQ with a question Is it recommended to be 100% delegated for a baker?

Having never heard of Tezos I guess its Mexican baking, or something to do with finance, or perhaps vote delegation in an election.

With SE sites like bicycles or christianity or dogs I can guess what the purpose of the site is.

Nowhere on the Tezos or its meta site is there a "what is Tezos?" to get users up to speed on the basics.

If I go and google the word, I learn its a protocol with something blockchain, contracts, rewards for participating, verification, etc.

Question: Does this site need an introduction to Tezos?

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Yes there's the [tour] but that only says

Tezos Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users, experts, and developers of the Tezos blockchain project.

if this were expanded a lot would be an ideal place for this info, rather than a question.

Answer 1

Not really; no moreso than Quantum Computing needs to explain what makes quantum theory so special, or Server Fault needs to explain what Enterprise IT people do all day. We have sites for LaTeX, GIS, Bioinformatics, Manga, Raspberry Pi, Drupal, Blender, Hermeneutics — and those sites are laser-targeted at practitioners who are already at least somewhat familiar with those subjects.

Folks outside that space are not your target audience.

What you want to avoid is trying to use the site for general outreach and evangelism. The Hot Network Questions list is full of questions for which I have no idea what they're asking about (and I curated most of these communities) — and that's okay. This isn't a market branch for Tezos to raise general awareness. The tone of this community is supposed to be that folks here know what they're talking about. Guard that premise jealously. It is simply outside the scope of this site to lure in the merely curious.

It's not that beginner questions are unwelcome, but putting it another way — you get the site you build, so encouraging questions like "What is Tezos?" leads to questions like "Why use Tezos over {X}?" and eventually swerves into debates over "How can you guys believe this stuff?"

We've avoided many of the pitfalls of communities trying to justify their own existence or explain what they do here all day. It just dilutes your content and encourages more questions like it. That's why I try to discourage the "staging" of introductory questions as early as Area 51. You can put as much detail and background information as you like in the tag wikis, but save the Q&A for problems you are actually trying to solve yourself.