Of course, "parent" takes up less space, but the first comers may think it is a link to a board discussing children upbringing.
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2 Answers
This was discussed briefly in the blog comments
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/07/new-per-site-metas/
I considered and discarded a lot of the alternatives, such as
- main (too close visually to meta)
- parent site (too long)
- actual name "english", "boardgames", "cooking" (too variable in every sense)
Main isn't bad but consider:
tools | chat | meta | about
vs
tools | chat | main | about
They're so close visually.. ugh.
edit: since this kept coming up across the network I decided to change it from "parent" to "main".
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Why not put 'main' in capital letters and 'meta' keep in small case? Jan 10, 2011 at 1:44
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Actually, now that I think on it a little more, main is better. It's obvious which site you're on — meta or main — so the fact that the names are both four-letter words beginning in "m" means nothing.– RobustoJan 10, 2011 at 3:34
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7@brilliant I AM SURPRISED SOMEONE ON THE ENGLISH SITE WOULD PROPOSE CHANGING TO ALL CAPS TO MAKE TEXT DIFFERENT. Jan 10, 2011 at 3:50
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@Jeff: It's a reasonable technique for SHORT pieces of text, though admittedly overused by lawyers (and presumably also by programmers back before the invention of the seventh bit :-P).– SamBJan 14, 2011 at 19:48
I don't see what difference it would make. I wondered what it meant for about 0.75 seconds and then figured it out. Shorter is better in links, IMO.
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3this was kind of my conclusion as well -- any college educated person should be able to figure out "meta", I hope, and it is part of our mission to educate folks in the broadest possible sense of the word. That said if there was a slam-dunk great alternative I would consider it but I wasn't seeing that. Jan 10, 2011 at 3:20