How are we doing?

Question

I understand the betas for Literature.SE and a whole mess of others are shutting down in a few days.

Now clearly we didn't get the axe. However, comparing our stats on Area51 with theirs, frankly the numbers are quite similar. The only place we have Literature clearly beat is that we have four times their "questions per day". However, we'd need about 8 times more than we have to make it into "healthy" territory there.

Most of the rest of our problem stats to me seem to boil down to "not enough people here".

So are we set to go the same way?

Answer 1

Only time will tell. Each SE site has certain expectations they must live up to, and if they don't then they get the axe. Your observation that we don't have enough people here is spot on, and ultimately that is what leads to the demise of most SE sites that don't make it. If anyone has any suggestions on how we can increase the number of regular site visitors, then please share that with us. Thanks!

There are five specific criteria they use to measure the success of each site, and we are doing "okay" in 3 of the 5. Below is a current summary, but this link will allow you to monitor our status in real time moving forward.

• Questions per day - Currently at 2.9, 15 per day is considered a healthy beta.
• Percentage answered - Currently at 94%, which is excellent, with 90% the goal.
• Number of users - Currently have 112 avid and 938 total. This is considered okay, but we need 150 users with 200+ rep (we have 112), 10 users with 2000+ rep (we have 9), and 5 users with 3000+ rep (we have 3).
• Answer ratio - Currently at 1.9, but the goal is 2.5 answers per question.
• Visits per day - Currently at 341, and the goal is 1500.

The first and last items both need a LOT of work, while the others are acceptable. If we can't improve considerably on the two bad ones, then this site will end up being dropped along with the others that didn't meet expectations.

BTW - We have some people who are close to crossing over into the higher thresholds, but they cna't get there if we don't have folks voting up their answers/questions. There are a lot of things we can do to get all our numbers up, and if we don't then we are going to lose the site.

Answer 2

I suspect the reason History was spared is similar to why Biblical Hermeneutics is still allowed to remain open. Shog9 posted in our meta that high-quality content and strong participation among core users were the primary factors for letting the site continue. Like hermeneutics, history is somewhat of a niche topic (though not quite as esoteric) and somewhat removed from the Stack Exchange core audience of technical people.

It also appears that the SE management takes into account subject matter when they evaluate a site. Literature seemed to have a lot of cross-over with the Science Fiction site, but I'm not sure there's much competition in the history space.

Finally, Shog9 encouraged us to find more people like us to participate. The problem is that if too many people stop participating, the site will cease to be viable. So leaving the site open is a risk for the SE folks. Growth (even slow growth) is probably more important than the Area 51 targets, from what I understand.

Answer 3

I wonder if the SE format might be imposing limitations on certain subjects. My understanding is that SE evolved out of computer related questions and it would correlate with the way in which questions here are asked and answered. I'm not necessarily saying that it the format is unworkable for history and other subjects, but it doesn't feel like it was designed for it. Particularly, in subjects like history debate is an important part of the subject (granted this is to a lesser extent true in technical subjects, but you can't argue with the BSoD). I'm surprised that the chat function hasn't been used here in 83 days, but I suppose that has to do with the lack of traffic.

Which leads me to my next point. I think the bigger issue is that most of the people involved in SE, from my experience, seem to be people who have some sort of technical background. They were ultimately drawn in from SE proper, CS, or similar sites. Obviously this puts us at a disadvantage as experts in history are less likely to come to our corner of SE as opposed to say network professionals to the technical side of SE. As an activist most of my friends graduated in social sciences and non-technical disciplines such as literature, my friends who are history majors have never heard of SE. I don't know if this has properly been taken in to consideration.

Answer 4

Coincidence! I just thought about making a meta thread here "Are we close to getting closed" too, as I saw economics.se shutting down.

I want to ask the stackexchange mods (e.g. @shog9), if they can give us a hint, if this site shows a good or bad traffic trend? All the stats are nice, unfortunately most don't look to often on them or keep track of how they change.

As far as I read some of the currently closed sites showed a traffic decline, less questions doesn't seem to be main problem, considering there are non-beta sites with around 3-5 questions per day.

What this site distinguishes from the closed ones is the amount of user with middle and high reputation putting effort into the site, very good answer ratio, healthy voting and meta discussion.

I'm a member of german.se, similar questions per day ratio for long time, but our traffic afaik grows slowly & constantly as the user number.

I think the only real problem (legitimating a close) our site currently shows is lack of advertising and many history-geeks being more interested in their local history and debating/googling it in their national language. At least in Germany we have a lot of hobby archeologists etc, smaller history forums. Funnily, covering worldwide history often poorly and not showing interesting questions from people from the other side of the globe makes me often watch history.se. It's the most international history forum I know. If this site gets closed I will probably shut down my participation in many of the smaller stackexchange niche beta sites with similar stats.

So I would really like to see a comment/answer by the SE mods where we stand, simply shutting down sites without a warning, while other with very similar stats are kept open leaves me a bit perplexed.

Also showing a bit more history.se questions on the front page would be fair. I don't know what the criterions are for putting a question on the http://stackexchange.com/questions site. But I never see a history.se question, but often very boring (to me) questions on simple english or mathematics problems with dozens of answers, more traffic (as these sites started earlier). I'm not sure the system is very fair here in sense of advertising new and smaller beta sites...