The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
We're seeing lots of good questions on the new site but we're also seeing lots of entry level questions, particularly ones that aren't actually based on a real life problem the poster is facing. I realise that people may be doing this to build up the site contet, but they're missing the context to make them really useful and they're often fairly open ended. This limits their value.
The private beta invite says the following:
'Remember, you get the site you build! Ask difficult, specific questions — the kind of questions pros and experts ask each other, not the kind of questions novices ask pros, because a site full of pros and experts will attract everybody, but a site full of novices rapidly becomes boring. No easy questions, no survey questions, no polls, no intro-level/basic questions, no unanswerable hypothetical questions.'.
How can we encourage our community to focus on more specific, high quality questions?
mopennock
we're also seeing lots of entry level questions, particularly ones that aren't actually based on a real life problem the poster is facing.
High quality questions can be encouraged through the following actions:
If a question that falls under #2 just needs a bit of work, you should comment on it with suggested edits. If you have editing rights, you should simply improve the question yourself. If the question is beyond help, you should show no hesitation in voting that the question be closed (link beneath question). Questions can be closed for any of the following reasons:
More importantly though, the best way that we can ensure high quality questions, is to rely on this stack exchange heavily in the work that we do. When you have specific, expert level questions that you would typically bring to a colleague or trusted peer in the community – bring it here instead. Send beta invites to people you would usually email questions to. Furthermore – if you work through a problem "offline" with one of your colleagues, and you think that it is a question that is not too specific and will be useful to the community, post the original question here, and have your colleague answer the question. I've done this on SO with problems we've worked through at Rhizome.