We've had a few go-rounds on the "what is professional?" topic already. The biggest one:
- Perception of purpose, from just under a year ago.
And every couple months someone will ask why a question of theirs was closed, and has to have explained to them why they should have read the FAQ or understood it better:
- Why was my question migrated to Super User?
- Should my question or the proposal be reopened?
- why was the question on dev server setup moved to SU?
As I see it, "professional" in the FAQ is a very key filter between us and SuperUser (the other one being the word "server"). We've already lost some active users because questions here aren't professional enough, and they saw the continual stream of un-clued askers as proof the SF concept had failed; they'd had enough of the "I'm totally under water, just give me a fix," attitude on other sites and fora. Having Professional in the FAQ gives us reason to close the more egregious questions like that.
One of our key problems is that System Administration is a very broad field. Linux professionals with ten years of experience suddenly thrust into an environment where they have to maintain Exchange and SharePoint (or Network Engineers suddenly working on servers) are going to be asking some very basic questions in spite of their otherwise deep experience. Sometimes you can tell that someone has that kind of deep experience and is in a new-to-them environment, other times they just can't ask good questions anyway and when doing so in another language it just comes out a barely coherent muddle.
The proposed wording expands the scope of ServerFault to a degree I disagree with. It may be 'revising to reflect reality', but the new wording puts an explicit endorsement on the behavior that many of our active users explicitly do not want. We have an active group of 3K+ users who vote-to-close these sorts of 'off topic' questions.