Let's get critical: Jun 2015 Site Self-Evaluation

Question

We all love Buddhism Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.

The Site Self-Evaluation review queue is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter. Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.

Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? Post an answer below to share your thoughts and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!

Community · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-17 09:56:02Z

So far, we (i.e. people who use this meta-site) have tentatively decided to avoid closing questions.

We haven't had (maybe we should or shouldn't have) a similar discussion about answers (e.g. what makes an answer good, bad, or better).

IMO this site has at least two categories of question: introductory, and relatively advanced. I don't know whether the answers are helpful in both categories, or are better at one than the other. If this topic is looking for faults to improve, would it help to consider those two categories separately?

One thing that does seem to be "going really well" is that so many of the questions which are asked are answered: and therefore I think the site (and users of the site) are being helpful.

There were a couple of posts recently on the main meta-site, which not everyone here will have read:

Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites

As of this post, not a single site currently active in our network is at risk of being closed. Closing public beta sites is a rare occurrence; we expect it to stay that way.
Should introspection be encouraged in light of the new standards for graduation?

Our goal for going public was to draw the community's focus away from numbers they couldn't easily change and onto quality issues that they could. Hence the talk of closing and editing.

I guess the last of the above quotes is saying that we shouldn't focus on the number of users or number of questions/day which we can't do much about; but that we can or should try to improve the quality of the site, which includes trying to improve numbers or metrics like 'number of questions closed' and 'number of posts edited' which might be trying to be some numeric measure of 'quality'.

FWIW I'm not sure it's possible to measure quality numerically.

Nevertheless, a focus on quality:

Some of the earlier posts on meta here were a focus on quantity: "Can we attract more users?"
Instead perhaps we should focus on quality: "Are there any suggestions for improving quality?"