Historically this site, meta.stackoverflow, has been the place to ask questions about not just Stack Overflow, but the functioning of the entire Stack Exchange (2.0) network, including Area 51 and stackexchange.com and careers.
(Yes, there was a meta.stackexchange, but that dealt with the old legacy Stack Exchange 1.0 sites. It was deprecated a while ago, and currently redirects here.)
Now that we've gotten many, many months under our belt from the SE 1.0 days, I think it's time that we gave Stack Overflow its own, true per-site meta, and moved the higher level network meta discussions to meta.stackexchange.com.
Over time, it's begun to bug me more and more that requests for Stack Overflow, the site, kind of get buried here on meta.stackoverflow under the avalanche of network issues. Retag requests, synonym requests, things truly specific to Stack Overflow, the site, not the network. This is unfair to our vastly largest and flagship Q&A site, and it's unfair to the Stack Overflow users to mix their requests in with network level concerns.
It's also odd that Stack Overflow is the only network site without a proper, dedicated per-site meta, where its meta has its own reputation system not tied to the parent site in any way.
This is mostly a quirk of history more than anything else, and I believe it is now an appropriate time to split into two sites:
meta.stackoverflow, a proper per-site meta for Stack Overflow with integrated rep
meta.stackexchange, a global network meta with its own reputation system
Yes, this will be painful. But I believe it is a good, necessary, and healthy step both for the future of the network and the future of Stack Overflow.
Some things to discuss:
which questions should be migrated from here to meta.so? Obviously site-specific things like the retag-requests, and perhaps questions with the stackoverflow tag. Anything that is 100% wholly specific to Stack Overflow and not generalizable to the rest of the network should be moved over. This may be a pretty small, narrow list of questions, and that's OK.
Should we do some meta spring cleaning in our transition? Which questions / tags should be blown away as no longer relevant, referring to ancient versions of Stack Overflow or issues that have long since ceased to exist and aren't instructive for any future visitors?
Your meta reps will generally be unaffected, except insofar as we delete for spring cleaning, or move site-specific things to meta.so. We still plan to have a distinct reputation system for the new meta.se site, just like here.
I do not have a timeline for this change, that is up to Jarrod and David to decide. It may be months away. However, we feel pretty strongly that this is something that we need to do to clean things up and pave the way for the future -- so I expect it will happen in the next few months, giving us lots of time to decide how we want to do it, per the above.
Update
This will be proceeding in January 2014This will be proceeding in January 2014.
