As someone very keen to see Genealogy & Family History Stack Exchange graduate from its Beta phase sooner rather than later, I keep a close eye on its Area 51 statistics which today are:
In order to graduate, my understanding is that getting each measure into the green is our target, but not necessarily a requirement. For example, GIS was a sea of green when it launched but Bicycles still had one red and one amber measure.
From our statistics it is clear that:
- we are doing a great job (green) of providing answers to the questions that do come in.
- we are doing quite OK (amber) on providing several answers to most questions which gives our community a chance to vote for which they like best
- we are also doing quite OK (amber, but green in 2 out of 3 subcategories) on assembling a solid group of core users
- our visits per day are OK (amber), but something we should keep an eye on. They are now at an all-time high for us but it did take quite a while to overhaul some heady figures in the first few weeks after the public beta commenced back in October 2012
- it is our questions per day that are our millstone (red)
I have seen opinions here in Meta that advertising G&FH SE more would be the panacea to our problems, and I suspect that it would certainly go quite some way towards it. However, many/most of us do not have large genealogical networks (or reputations) to facititate free advertising, so I would like to explore several other ways that every one of us can attack the low questions per day problem:
- Ask more questions - we see some great questions (and great answers) here but not every question needs to be a work of art, and I encourage everyone to explore the full range of questions that they could ask.
- Upvote more questions - while we are so short of questions, to encourage those that are willing to ask questions to ask more, I think we should Vote Early and Vote Often
- Downvote sparingly - while we are so short of questions I advocate tolerance so as not to discourage those that do ask poorly framed questions, because those questions count towards our count per day just as much as great questions
- Edit to improve questions rather than closing, wherever possible - in trying to do this more lately I have started to enjoy the challenge of enabling a vague question to receive a reasonable to great answer.
Some of the above also apply to answers and general encouragement of new users, but I see our immediate problem as being a low volume of questions.
Is the above a sensible approach to the "low questions per day" problem?
One reason I think graduating is important is so that we can get a post here like Network Engineering SE earned recently. Getting a "designed for us" site branding would be great reward for the hard work put in by so many users over the past few years.
Further reassurance that we are here to stay has been posted in this Meta SE Q&A: Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites