- We have the smallest population, by far, of any graduated site - 2.7K users. The next smallest are Ask Patents, with 4.7K and Christianity, with 5K.
- Our traffic, similarly, is lower than almost every other graduated site's - 2.1K visits/day. Ask Patents has only 1.1K, but the next least busy after us is Theoretical Computer Science, with 3.7K.
... which range from 7.1 questions/day all the way down to 1.6 questions/day.
- Our Percent answered (see recent work by @msh210 on this) is middling at 88%, with many graduated sites higher, and many lower, all the way down to Ask Ubuntu, with 67%.
We've discussed similar stats here in the past, so the following interpretations are pretty much not novel:
- Our population is small but very active.
- We have many fewer people finding our stuff through search and passively reading it, per question, than other sites.
- As discussed recently, getting more questions answered is a possible area we can improve upon through concerted effort.
- The combination of a small population and a high rate of questions getting posted may contribute to the rate of unanswered questions.
@IsaacMoses thank you for the report and analysis!
An additional conclusion: outreach will still pay dividends for us; because we are small, each new user who becomes active makes a bigger difference than (e.g.) the millionth user on SO.
The Twitter feed (the one Isaac maintains, not the bot) is a nice help here. I can't tell yet how much traffic we're getting from that (I'm not sure I'd be able to tell, actually), but we should keep doing that and hope it spreads.
Unanswered questions could possibly be put to use in outreach; if there's a particular person we want to try to draw in and we have a question that'd be right up his alley to answer, we should connect those dots. It's easy to say "yeah I'll go read that site" and forget about it, but "hey, these guys asked for my help on this specific problem" may be a little stronger. (No guarantees, of course.)
When I said "person we want to try to draw in", I didn't mean community goals so much as individual ones. If you know that your friend Ploni is particularly interested in some topic, maybe finding a question he could answer could help in the pitch?
@MonicaCellio Uh, yeah. I need to get back on that (unfortunately been neglecting it for a few days)
@MonicaCellio Very good point. I once emailed about MY to a friend of mine who's a real talmid chacham, and he replied "looks nice; let me know if there are any specific questions you need me to answer."
... In other words, he wasn't interested in hanging out here to see what comes up, but he'd potentially be willing to write answers on call. (I don't think I've succeeded in getting him to do the latter, yet.)
... I have found that referring questions to known experts in the particular fields (e.g. R' Slifkin, Koren Publishers) is frequently a rewarding experience. It seldom gets the expert to actually come here and post an answer (though it did with R' Ari Greenspan), and I don't think I've ever gotten the expert to become a recurring user, but it frequently nets information that becomes a high-quality answer. This is pretty easy to do, and I encourage everyone to try it from time to time.
Incidentally, after posting this data, I remembered that 'tis the season of the 4th anniversary of mi.yodeya's initial establishment in private alpha - 20 Kislev / 6 December.
@MonicaCellio Mainly, I just need to sit down and schedule some tweets. I'd still love to have some teammates to help with that. The suggestions, however, are very helpful, since they cut out half the task (the searching part).
@MonicaCellio Thanks! Looking forward to my 4th Yearling badge in a couple of days. :)
@IsaacMoses which will no longer be announced on the front page (hot questions have moved into that spot), but we can see recent badges on the badges page now, just FYI y'all.
@IsaacMoses I created a Twitter account when you started this project. Now that I've been on there for a little while I feel like I've got more of a feel for the place, so maybe I can help now. What does scheduling tweets involve? (I considered asking this in the other room but I'm asking here for visibility.)
@MonicaCellio Thanks. To schedule a tweet, I go to my dashboard on HootSuite, pick a date (typically one that doesn't already have a tweet scheduled) and time (essentially arbitrary) for the question, compose a tweet that attempts to pique interest in the question and includes a link of the form http://mi.yodyea.com/q/QQQQQ/UUU (where QQQQQ is the question ID and UUU is the ID of the user who suggested tweeting this question), hit the "Schedule" button, and acknowledge whoever suggested the
... question in the chat room
My typical workflow for advance-scheduling a week's worth has been: Search for each amud of daf yomi that comes up in the coming week and see if there are any good questions for that. If so, schedule tweets for those. Look through all questions for the week's parasha that have been suggested in the chat room and, working from my favorite of them for tweeting to my least favorite, schedule tweets for them at least until the week has one tweet per day Su - F or until I've schedule all of them
... that I really want to tweet, whichever comes last. If there are still days with no tweets, find a recent cool question and schedule that.
(Plus similar steps for upcoming holidays, either before or after parasha.)
@MonicaCellio Yes. I would share the logon info with any co-tweeters, and we'd all log on as the same user. Part of the dashboard lists scheduled tweets chronologically, so you can see which questions have already been scheduled and which days have no tweets. If two people were literally working on this at the same time, there could still be some collision, but I don't see that as a significant danger.
... also, announcing acknowledgements of suggestions and progress in the chat room can help keep efforts coordinated
@IsaacMoses right, not worried about that level of synchronization problem. Besides, since it's a scheduler, not a tweeter, if two of us did somehow duplicate a tweet, there'd be a chance to notice.
@MonicaCellio I've done some tweeting in real-time, too (e.g. late-breaking daf yomi questions). Anyway, if two people tweeted the same question two different ways, it's really not the end of the world.
As a lawyer, I know that rules are to be interpreted by looking primarily to the plain meaning of the words. If the words are a prohibited commandment, then they must be sufficiently clear as to allow no ambiguity or misundestanding. Otherwise, they cannot be enforced. This commandment has alwa...
I see this Community user on the user page. It also seems to edit posts sometimes. What is it?
And why has it downvoted over 1800 times?
Related
What are “Community Wiki” posts?
Return to FAQ Index
@MosheP. not automatically. If they are "not an answer" (per the flag reason) they might get deleted by a mod, but if they are merely a poor answer they usually stick around. Which isn't bad -- they serve as "no, not this" warnings of a sort. High-rep users can vote to delete answers.
In general, mods won't step in on things the community can do (like deletions) unless it's either quite clear or somehow urgent. (We're more likely to step in to put questions on hold because that is, explicitly, intended to be temporary.)
@MosheP. questions with negative votes and no up-voted answers get automatically deleted after some time. Hang on while I look that up.
Just to formally document the exact policies we have in place to remove old abandoned / dead questions, the Community user will delete questions in the following circumstances:
If the question is more than 30 days old, and ...
has −1 or lower score
has no answers
is not locked
...or...
it ...
(Note: it's not really a year; that's just the title of the question. That link is to an answer.)
@IsaacMoses I've noticed and like the former and agree that the latter isn't a problem. I'm willing to help; feel free to email me a link.
@HodofHod @MosheP. Usually bot/script. Sometimes things are done manually and attributed to Community (though I don't recall, now, under what circumstances).
The top bar of a Stack Exchange site has always been a bit of an odd place. It somehow combines user info, navigation, search, and a one-size-fits-all popup that includes hot network questions, a list of 100+ Stack Exchange sites, personal inbox messages, and other system notifications (lovingly referred to as The StackExchange™ MultiCollider SuperDropdown™).
It was, in retrospect, overdue for a face-lift which is why we’re excited to roll out a new top bar this week.
So, in the redesigned top bar, we wanted to make sure that it would look the same across all sites, and make it obvious that you’ …
I see this Community user on the user page. It also seems to edit posts sometimes. What is it?
And why has it downvoted over 1800 times?
Related
What are “Community Wiki” posts?
Return to FAQ Index
Just to formally document the exact policies we have in place to remove old abandoned / dead questions, the Community user will delete questions in the following circumstances:
If the question is more than 30 days old, and ...
has −1 or lower score
has no answers
is not locked
...or...
it ...
