Let's get critical: Apr 2014 Site Self-Evaluation

Question

We all love History 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!

Answer 1

Final Results

• Roman navy propelled by animals instead of human rowers?

Net Score: 3 (Excellent: 4, Satisfactory: 5, Needs Improvement: 1)

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• Is Howard Roark's potted history of architecture accurate?

Net Score: 2 (Excellent: 4, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 2)

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• Before Pearl Harbor, what percentage of Americans believed the US would stay out of the war?

Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 4, Satisfactory: 2, Needs Improvement: 3)

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• What English king died from water intoxication?

Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 4, Needs Improvement: 2)

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• Light cavalry in medieval western Europe?

Net Score: 1 (Excellent: 2, Satisfactory: 6, Needs Improvement: 1)

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• How did the United States avoid (or recover from) post revolution corruption?

Net Score: 0 (Excellent: 4, Satisfactory: 0, Needs Improvement: 4)

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• Are the "bone fields" of the Stalingrad encircled battlefields real?

Net Score: 0 (Excellent: 2, Satisfactory: 5, Needs Improvement: 2)

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• What specifc training occurred for members of medieval military orders?

Net Score: -4 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 4, Needs Improvement: 5)

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• What populations have been denied the ability to leave a territory, so that its goverment could kill them?

Net Score: -4 (Excellent: 1, Satisfactory: 3, Needs Improvement: 5)

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• To what extent were religious groups persecuted in the Soviet Union?

Net Score: -5 (Excellent: 0, Satisfactory: 4, Needs Improvement: 5)

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Answer 2

I thought this "survey" was kind of bogus because the questions in it were obviously cherry picked to be the highest quality questions that could be found.

If you look at the average question on the site, it is nowhere near the quality of the ones in the survey. Half the questions on the site are like "Was Hitler a bad guy?" Just completely inane, usually opinionated. One guy posted a question complaining about how ancient Romans were sodomizing slave boys, how terrible that was, as though there was something we could all do about that historical condition. Oh, yeah, lets all get into a time machine, and go back and convince the Romans not to engage in pederasty. So glad you brought this problem to our attention.

If you are going to start doing "site surveys", I suggest making it a little more representative of the actual content of the site.