There will be just one site where anyone can ask questions on any topic and anyone can answer any question. But there will be still some universal criteria for closing a question. As someone has said, we don't want another yahoo answers.
The reputation and other user-specific things will be managed for the whole site.
Questions will be tagged, just as they are on the present sites. But tagging will have more important roles.
When a tag will be used in a certain number of questions (say 20k), then some process can be started to define the tag as a "Super tag." It will not be an automatic process. The community will decide whether a tag will become a "Super tag" or not.
For each "Super tag," there will be a sub-domain of the main site like "dotnet.stackexchange.com" or "webapps.stackexchange.com". Or, "Super tags" could have their own domains. The sub-domain/domain name may or may not be same as the "Super tag" name. There will be specific designs for each "Super tag" as well. In other words, these "Super tags" will become new sites like present different Stack Exchange sites.
Any user profile/reputation can be queried against a "Super tag" to get a tag-specific profile/reputation. Visitors to "Super tag" subsites will see tag-specific user reputation. For some privileges like chat and retagging the overall reputation will be used while for some other like closing a question will require tag-specific reputation.
Some special rules can be applied to these "Super tags" if needed.
Normally a question can be asked under more than one "Super tag"s.
There may be something like "tag inheritance." There will be a parent tag for each tag. So,
[c#]
and[vb]
will have[DotNet]
as their parent.[google]
and[yahoo]
will belong to[WebApps]
;[baking]
will belong to[Cooking]
. The top level tags will have null. If this cannot be managed, a tag may have more than one parent.When a question is tagged with a child tag, it will be considered tagged with all its parent tags in upper levels. So, it will be easier to organize different tags of the same type under one umbrella. And these umbrella parent tags have higher chances to become "Super tags."
Each user will be able to customize his home page and other pages by subscribing to one or more "Super tags." So he will just see specific types of questions, and the other questions will not bother him, keeping this Stack Overflow ideology in mind: Isn't StackOverflow becoming too generic?Isn't StackOverflow becoming too generic?
replaced http://meta.stackexchange.com/ with https://meta.stackexchange.com/