What is biggest problem facing Genealogy & Family History Stack Exchange?

Question

I was recently involved in a moderator election on another Stack Exchange site and the question that made me think the hardest was:

What do you think is the biggest problem facing this SE? Do you think there needs to be any changes made to the policy or rules - what would you suggest?

I would like to ask the users of G&FH SE the same question i.e. what do you think is the biggest problem facing the Genealogy and Family History Stack Exchange, and what policy/rule change would you suggest to address it?

If you think there is more than one big problem, then I recommend using more than one answer to describe each individually so that we can use votes to float the one(s) perceived by our community to be the biggest to the top.

Answer 1

Not enough questions, pure and simple.

Questions needs answers, and scope to answer attracts regular users. Without interesting questions, it's hard to attract more users and more traffic. Obviously high-quality questions are better than low-quality questions. But even bad questions can be improved through editing. In my view, it's better to have more questions of modest initial quality than just a few questions.

Answer 2

Focus on English language and thereby no user base for curating questions from an international multilingual community. This is a huge problem, even for regular users, because e.g. Americans won't find help with their European, non-British ancestors.

Answer 3

Genealogy.SE is demanding. A lot of genealogy message boards work like this: Users often have no precise questions ("searching everything on John Doe!1!") and often don't get specific answers (e.g. the first googled document that mentions some John Doe). But a certain amount of content of this kind attracts search engines and users that actually add benefit to such a site.

Answer 4

No upvotes for good questions and answers the regulars are just not interested in (see no 1, one of our most visited questions at all has just seven votes for example). Good but late answers have no chance of getting voted up to compete with earlier but more generic answers.

Answer 5

Part of the problem may be that we are fighting against a trend in genealogy (and in consumer-oriented computing in general) for "one-stop shopping" designed to lock users into ecosystems.

Example: I have a Windows computer, an Android phone, and an iPod. I suspect this is unusual because Apple has put a great deal of energy into providing an environment which is vertically-integrated.

In genealogy, Ancestry provides both a desktop product (Family Tree Maker) and the online resources of Ancestry.com. The Ancestry website is laughingly primitive when it comes to member-to-member communication, but the message inbox and member forums, ugly as they are, make it easy for people to sign up for Ancestry.com and never leave the 'walled garden'.

You can substitute 'Family Tree Builder' and 'My Heritage' and so on and the pattern repeats. Brightsolid is setting up the same scenario with FindMyPast because they are also setting up a family tree manager.

So the audience for FH&G.SE is automatically limited to the subset of users who are brave enough to actually do a search of sites like Google and find things outside of Ancestry.com or MyHeritage.com or whatever their chosen ecosystem might be.