This is part of a set of questions on how Server Fault defines "professional" system and network administration. For additional information, see:
There is this thing about ServerFault I've just accepted and did not question - its focus on the sysadmin audience and not a topical area. Given the recent discussions about the site's dynamics and contour, I started to wonder why this is so. As the site did not go through the proposal/incubator process of Area51, I had trouble finding much on this topic.
What is so specific about the system and network administration topic that this Q&A site would not work outside of a "professional" scope compared to, say, coding. Or photography. Or Unix. Or IT Security. All sites' communities (including Stack Overflow's) seem to cope well with a wide variety of skill levels and topics, so why is Server Fault calling for an exception here?
Are there historical posts (Blogs or Meta) documenting the reasoning or a discussion about why SF has been targeted at "professional" sysadmins? Who made this decision? With what rationale?
What I could find so far indicates that the community originally has been imagined significantly broader than what it is being defined as currently. For example this announcement of the public beta which incidentally contains this section:
Richard and Greg talk to Jeff Atwood of Stack Overflow fame about being a developer who also maintains infrastructure.
And this announcement from Jeff Atwood's blog which explicitly invites exactly those "half-professionals" to the site who are being declared non-grata lately:
So if you're a bona-fide BOFH, or just a wanna-be BOFH luser like me, join us on Server Fault. Who knows, maybe we lusers can learn something from each other.
Please note that I am not asking the questions to imply that some of the regulars of this community are redlining too much (although there certainly are days where I am under this impression), but because I really would like to hear the arguments to get a better understanding of what is going on.
