When a proposal goes to beta, there are some minimum activity requirements. In specific,
Are you aware of any published research on those numbers? Or an official post how they came with them?
Those metrics were just fabricated when Area 51 was created. They may have been tweaked over the early years of Area 51, but have not been messed with in a long time. There was no research that could be done or looked into on community Q&A creation at the time because it didn't really exist yet. They may have been based on the stats of the SOFU sites that already existed at the time, but are otherwise just generic invented numbers, as are the requirements for the definition and commitment phases of the site creation process.
At one point, Grace Note did a deep dive into evaluating numbers of successful sites on the network to determine if any of these metrics were actually good measures. That wasn't so much a research project more than just comparing the sites to get an idea if any of the criteria mattered. The base conclusion was that only the 10 questions per day metric mattered for detecting viable candidates for graduation.
Today, we don't really pay attention to those numbers when evaluating sites anymore. You can see the criteria we most recently used for sites leaving public beta in this announcement: Congratulations to the 59 sites that just left Beta - That used the "answered" stat as one criteria, but lowered to 70% from the suggestions of 90% and 80% in the text here. Because even some of our highest traffic sites do not maintain those thresholds. Before that, we graduated all sites that were 7 years old with no additional criteria.
