I'm not sure where I come out on this. On the grand scale I can see all the arguments about not diluting the site's focus. On the other hand, I don't see that it would reduce the amount of Perl expertise offered, because nobody *has* to answer OT questions. Any OT topics that don't get answered will wither on the vine. But on the large scale I can see both sides.

At a personal level I wd really like to see this happen, however. I'm self-employed and largely self-taught, and I live in the countryside and I do everything on the sites I look after. I have no colleagues! And the only subject I *regularly* need help with, and on which I have anything to offer, is Perl. As a result I've become quite involved with this community, to the extent that I speak the language, feel confident to ask and answer questions, and know how to make the best of the advice I get. But from time to time I get stuck on something that I'm sure is trivial, usually a linux or Apache sysadmin-type question, and I just know that someone here could knock it on the head in a second, and would probably get the same satisfaction from doing that as I wd from answering a Perl question I knew about... and I would love to have a licence to ask such a question. I suppose my alternative is to join a linux community and an Apache community and a MySQL community... and if I get deeply stuck, that's what I'll do. But (A) I think Perlmonks is unusual not just among Perl sites but among online communities generally; (B) the expertise I need is here, and I like it here and I don't really want to go anywhere else (C) what do I have to offer in return? - in Perl, yes, I can answer some of the easier questions, but in linux / sysadmin I am a total newb; whereas I do actually know quite a lot of HTML, and I've forgotten more about Excel than most people ever bothe to know (having worked eight years in investment banking), so a multi-topic community would give me a chance to answer the stuff I know about and ask the stuff I don't know about. It's called comparative advantage - it's why trade is so good.

So at the end of that ramble I come out in favour. But I agree with monks who say it ought to be restricted in some way to prevent annoying freeloading by people who don't have a commitment to the community. That seems ok for Perl questions, but it cd just get out of hand if we open it up too far. I liked the plan of preventing anyone below Monk from asking OT questions. Anyone who wants to can get to that level by posting on Perl, and by then you've shown you're a good citizen.

§ George Sherston

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