It's been a few of years since we did an automated self-evaluation and it seemed like a good time to look critically at this site again. In particular, a moderator noticed an unseasonal drop in visitors this September and wondered if there was something going on in the content. (For those with 5k, see this report.) We aren't doing automated evaluations anymore, but we still think introspection is a good idea.
Below, I've listed 5 questions chosen at random from the last quarter that have received at least some anonymous feedback. I also included two scores*:
- How helpful the page seemed to regular users.
- How helpful the page seemed to anonymous visitors.
The range is from 0 to 100% where bigger numbers mean more helpful than small numbers. The final number is the number of total views the question had received at the time of sampling.
If you'd like to participate, please copy the question list into an answer for evaluation. Exactly how you evaluate the questions and answers is up to you, but it would be useful to:
Find better answers on the internet (if they exist).
Exactly what "better" means is up to you, but the criteria might include:
- correctness,
- understandability,
- authoritative (e.g. citing official sources),
- clean formatting, or
- easier to find with a search.
Figure out why regular users and anonymous visitors have different opinions of the usefulness of the page.
The most common reason for low visitor scores is low views, which limits the number of anonymous users who provide feedback. It's not a problem if some questions are so niche that nobody outside of the community reads them. But chance visitors who find answers via search are the best source of new contributors.
More interesting: sometimes visitors disagree with the site's community about the usefulness of a question and its answers. Obviously we can't know why people who can't leave comments might differ from current users, but we can make an educated guess.
Fix any problems you notice and describe your changes.
After doing the above analysis, you will be in good shape to edit titles and tags to help Google direct searchers to the question, clean up formatting and grammar problems, and link to authoritative sources. There's no need to wait; go edit.
The goal is to use the sample to reflect on how the site is progressing in terms of "making the internet a better place for people to get answers to their astronomy questions". If this site already does a good job, that's wonderful. If there are some things that need fixing, please talk about that. In either case, this evaluation mostly stands to improve this community's understanding of itself.
Key: link (registered voters; anonymous voters; views)
- Cat in a electronics hobbyist house (90%; 74%; 2,604)
- Why is my rabbit / bunny angry? (89%; 59%; 3,833)
- How best to discipline a kitten? (91%; 70%; 4,912)
- How to keep my cat stress free during periods of constant 90dB+ sound? (95%; 73%; 7,391)
- How is a dog's health affected if he's (almost) never bathed? (92%; 83%; 5,259)
Footnote:
* The scores are actually the lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter, which is a measure of how likely a given set of upvotes and downvotes is overall positive. For the first score, I used the sum of all votes on the question and all answers. For the second score, I used anonymous feedback. Please see the query I used for implementation details.
