ServerFault is intended for professional sysadmins. I think that this is a good policy. It helps keep the site on focus.
Has there ever been thought into restricting membership to professional administrators?
I'm not suggesting how to do that, or even necessarily implying that it's possible. But since the focus is somewhat exclusionary, should the membership also be exclusionary?
The problem with this is the unanswerable question:
How do you define a Professional System Administrator?
Unlike professionally licensed fields (architects, engineers, lawyers, doctors) there really isn't a unified (or even fractured) system for licensing / credentialing sysadmins (though arguably the profession would be well served by one given some of the people that pass for "sysadmins").
Similarly membership in a professional organization isn't a prerequisite -- even LOPSA (arguably the largest "sysadmin association") doesn't cover more than a tiny fraction of our active contributing membership.
Aside from the above, I think the idea of exclusionary membership runs counter to the principles underlying Stack Exchange -- Even though Server Fault is an oddity in that we're geared toward being a site "for professionals" the idea of open membership and a community-controlled meritocracy seems like a better fit than restricting who can say what.
Sometimes the best ideas come from the outside, and the community (SF and System Administration at large) should not be set up in a way that excludes outside voices. Better to hear them and then decide if they're crazy or not.
I've always interpreted the requirement for professional sysadmins as referring to the job a person is doing and/or their ability to present issues here in a professional manner rather than membership of a professional association. While the latter is something I'd love to see in the industry anyway, it shouldn't be a requirement for posting here.
In other words, I see our requirement for professionalism as a quality bar for questions, not a barrier to entry for people asking those questions.
No, membership shouldn't be exclusive to "professionals."
No matter how professional is defined, people outside the definition can ask good questions or provide good answers so it doesn't make sense to exclude them. A likely scenario is someone who used to be a professional sysadmin but is now a developer or coffee roaster or something...
in a maintainable mannerdoesn't pass muster. Home use questions are still explicitly excluded, even if your home is run like a tier 1 datacenter, and a newbie's idea of maintainable may be plain wrong. There is a (social) barrier to entry, it's just not one that can be codified as "member of professional organization", "licensed professional", etc. Our use offor Information Technology professionalsandin a professional capacityare essentially a catch-all: there's probably a better way to phrase it, but we haven't found it yet.