This is the part of the announcement that I'd like to emphasize.
Around the same time we recognized that "small sites" may never hit
that target but they can still be successful sites and they wouldn't
be at risk of closure unless they failed to maintain moderation levels
to keep spam at bay and the questions on-topic and of good quality.
This was a great step towards helping y'all feel that your communities
would be safe from closure.
Are we:
- keeping spam at bay?
- keeping questions on-topic?
- maintaining good quality questions?
My concern is that in the desire to meet the 10+ questions per day metric, we not doing what we could to make sure we have questions of good quality.
What can we do better? I'd like to see:
- more effort to welcome newcomers when they ask their first question
- answers that will help more people than just the single person who wrote the question
- community members using comments to improve the question, instead of answering questions in the comments, or having extended conversations in the comments
- question titles which are about the kind of problem the person is trying to solve, not the specific family they want to know about
A friend of mine who is a Stack Exchange user on other sites calls her philosophy of answering SE questions "teaching someone to fish, instead of just giving them the fish". Have we talked about the process of doing research, or are we just showing off superior lookup skills? Simply looking up a missing record for someone -- the "here's your fish" approach -- doesn't help anyone else learn how to solve a similar problem.