> > > Hello Sage Users: >> > >> > I proposed a Sage Stack Exchange site for Sage. Please go and follow it; >> > add example questions and vote up (down) questions that you think >> should be >> > on-topic (resp. off-topic) for the upcoming site. >> > >> > >> http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/70511/sage?referrer=8adE6ec0VyqQCyB1kFgF7g2 >> > >> > Looking forward to your support and cooperation for the success of this >> > adventure on Stack Exchange. >> > >> > /p/s/ I would be soon adding my quota of 5 questions... >> >> Does one really need an SE site for Sage? What's wrong with >> http://ask.sagemath.org/ in your opinion then? >> >
The only real problem with ask.sagemath, as Kannappan says, is the spammers. Advantages: * Many people already have SE (e.g., mathoverflow) accounts, and these would be connected * They handle spam etc. for you * Could migrate questions on other SE products to this, or vice versa Disadvantage (for some): * platform itself not open-source Disadvantages: * Not connected to previous rep mechanism for ask.sagemath * Not connected to previous answers/questions (harder to work on dups, etc) * Admin privileges etc are not up to Sage * "If the site does not get used, it will be deleted." * Do we own the data? There is a CC license but is it exportable? * Unclear and hard (for us) to reach standards of business. To me, the last one is the real problem. For instance, at one time "15 questions per day on average is a healthy beta" but we definitely did not always hit that even in the most halcyon days of ask.sagemath. I'll note that http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq seems to have gotten rid of any formal requirements, but there are definitely still standards to make it TO beta, much less out. Compare the graduated versus not proposals, e.g. http://area51.stackexchange.com/?tab=launched Let's see what it says. Remember, SE is a *business* that wants to drive traffic. Not first and foremost to simply have quality Q&A sites. Sage doesn't (yet), in my view, have enough traffic to drive this. It could! But it doesn't yet. * 15 questions per day on average is a healthy beta, 5 questions or fewer per day needs some work. A healthy site generates lots of good content to make sure users keep coming back. Probably we would need to increase our regular traffic (I mean compared to when we didn't have the anti-spam measures in place) by at least 50%. * 2.5 answers per question is good, only 1 answer per question needs some work. On a healthy site, questions receive multiple answers and the best answer is voted to the top. I would argue that with most ask.sagemath questions, we really don't need more than one answer per question. But SE doesn't probably care about that. And I will also point out that MANY of our questions are quite technical or don't ever get answers - see http://ask.sagemath.org/questions/?sort=answers-asc&page=6 (though to be fair, many of the answers to these are in comments, which SE would strongly discourage). * We recommend: 150 users with 200+ rep 10 users with 2,000+ rep 5 users with 3,000+ rep Even on the CURRENT ask.sagemath we have about 50 with 200+ rep. We do have the requisite number of very-high-rep users, and are likely to continue to have. This is mainly because we don't have the critical mass yet - in order to really rack up reputation, you either need to answer a LOT of questions, or be one of the few people who answers questions interesting to a lot of people in the (as yet, smallish) Sage community. Most people who answer a question get only one or two up votes, even if the answer is correct. * 90% answered is a healthy beta, 80% answered needs some work. In the beta it's especially important that when new visitors ask questions they usually get a good answer. I believe I've already touched on this. We are not currently going to be there. * 1,500 visits per day is good, 500 visits per day needs some work. A great site benefits people outside the community. Eventually, 90% of a site's traffic should come from search engines. I don't know anything about this. But based on # of views, which is easy to see, it looks like we get between 20 and 50 views for a given question. (Older ones get more, of course). Let's say we get 50 views per 10 questions - that is 500 visits per day, assuming that's what they mean by visits. On ALL metrics, Sage is not ready for a SE proposal to go anywhere, and that would be worse. Instead, all the people who just committed to the proposal should put on their thinking caps to get us a sensible anti-spam measure for our current site. I am not saying this because I am a curmudgeon; I am saying this because I just spent the last hour reading through all the many complaints of proposal which aren't going to make it out of beta and will have to start from scratch, and I don't want that to happen to us. It would only lead to confusion for those who actually want help. - kcrisman -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
