Timeline for Server Fault needs professional-quality questions, not just questions from professionals
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
30 events
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:14 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://serverfault.com/ with https://serverfault.com/
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| Nov 24, 2014 at 3:09 | comment | added | Wesley | I think it is a non zero chance that sources of questions from anything not directly Google related were pushed out at about roughly the same ratio as the Google traffic increased. But I could also see the plummeting quality being as a result of momentum that was set in place long before the Google bump. Maybe the bump from Google is a red herring. I don't really know, but it seems like something to be explored. Nevertheless, the solution to either cause of the problem is the same. Some simple barriers to asking a question. Nothing snobbish. Nothing pompous. | |
| Nov 24, 2014 at 1:26 | comment | added | Shane Madden StaffMod | @Wesley Well, without doing some serious manual labor to blindly classify question quality before and after the google boost.. does it seem more likely that our "normal" question sources reduced by exactly the amount that the boost added, to keep the total volume even, or just that the boost didn't add much? | |
| Nov 24, 2014 at 1:16 | comment | added | Wesley |
@ShaneMadden "the point I'm making is that the common perception that the google hordes brought a tide of low quality questions is not supported by the actual data." I just wanted to bring up, that it has not been proven that the influx of Google traffic is innocent in the low quality content. We've only been shown a rather broad number of weekly questions being asked, but the proof one way or the other is within that 850 per week number. How do make context from within that number? idunnolol
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| Nov 23, 2014 at 19:43 | comment | added | sysadmin1138 Mod | @ShaneMadden He's seen it before ;). | |
| Nov 23, 2014 at 13:20 | comment | added | MadHatter | @ShaneMadden: that sums it up very pithily indeed; thank you for that. I'm unconvinced by your solution because we've had the problem for some time; a solution is now badly needed, or more of the people in the room will just give up and leave. By all means, once the room contains more people, unbar the door; but for now, a barricade is needed. | |
| Nov 23, 2014 at 11:42 | comment | added | Shane Madden StaffMod | @sysadmin1138 By the way, I showed Tom the graph, he was amused :) | |
| Nov 23, 2014 at 11:41 | comment | added | Shane Madden StaffMod | @MadHatter I'm more referring to "easy" questions than poorly asked ones, but regardless, I think we're both looking at the same problem and seeing different solutions. Too many people sticking their heads in for the people in the room to deal with? I'm saying get more people to deal with them and spread the load, and you're saying barricade the door. | |
| Nov 23, 2014 at 9:27 | comment | added | MadHatter | @ShaneMadden: sysadmin1138's right, there is a reason for that. The reason is that, given a roomful of experts, the odd head shoved round the door to ask an uninformed, under-prepared question can be helped without problems. But a constant stream of such heads can't. My attitude is that most of these questions were never on-topic, but we used to have the bandwidth to indulge them. I feel that we no longer do. | |
| Nov 23, 2014 at 0:25 | comment | added | Shane Madden StaffMod | @MadHatter Ok, then, ask yourself this: are there questions that you see now that you think are out of scope, but would have been in scope based on the community's standards a few years ago? See the last paragraph of sysadmin1138's answer, I'm not the only one who thinks that's the case. | |
| Nov 23, 2014 at 0:15 | comment | added | MadHatter | @ShaneMadden: "the common perception that the google hordes brought a tide of low quality questions is not supported by the actual data". It isn't contradicted by it, either; since, as you've noted to me above, you're refusing to allow the community to decide whether a question is of high or low quality, then the proposition's undecidable. I don't know that I'd go so far as Iain and say that perception is the only reality, but I don't acknowledge the existence of some arbitrary oracle which can render an objective judgement of a question's quality. | |
| Nov 22, 2014 at 23:25 | comment | added | Shane Madden StaffMod | @StefanLasiewski Not necessarily, since much (most?) of the active communities of those sites are not people that were SF users before the sites existed. No change on the policy of "overlap is ok," see here. | |
| Nov 22, 2014 at 23:07 | comment | added | Stefan Lasiewski | What is the impact of the newer Stackexchange sites like unix.stackexchange.com, dba.stackexchange.com, & security.stackexchange.com, and a dozen others to ServerFault? Four years ago, SF was the main place on the Trilogy to ask Unix questions, many kinds of Database Administration questions, and IT Security questions. Today, we have SF AND these SE sites. As those sites gain traffic and quality questions, isn't it expected that SF will lose at least an equal amount of traffic & quality questions? | |
| Nov 22, 2014 at 22:49 | comment | added | user9517 | @ShaneMadden It doesn't matter what the data says, people's perception is their reality. If people perceive SF to be a river of shit then that's exactly what it is. | |
| Nov 22, 2014 at 22:31 | comment | added | Shane Madden StaffMod | @Iain I think we're going to have to agree to disagree, but the point I'm making is that the common perception that the google hordes brought a tide of low quality questions is not supported by the actual data. | |
| Nov 22, 2014 at 22:23 | comment | added | user9517 |
I know that an increase in low quality questions is the perception. Perception is the only reality. @ShaneMadden
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| Nov 22, 2014 at 21:41 | comment | added | ewwhite | My other problem with this "new class" of users is that they usually don't return, provide feedback to (my) followup question or even bother accepting answers. A quick query on data.stackexchange.com shows that I've answered 1,168 questions where the OP didn't even select an answer. Many of these were abandoned. They're treating this site like Yahoo Answers. | |
| Nov 22, 2014 at 18:39 | comment | added | Shane Madden StaffMod | @MadHatter Sure, and more directly we can look at simply the percentage of questions closed - but my point is that those metrics can only be a a measure of whether the question was considered good by the community at the time it was created. It doesn't objectively measure whether it's the questions that have changed or our standards that have changed. | |
| Nov 22, 2014 at 15:51 | comment | added | MadHatter | @Shane: "it's very hard to objectively measure if question quality has gone up or down". One measure would be to look at the fraction of questions opened in each day which were still open 14 days later, and/or the average vote score on each question after a similar period, for all days in the last three years (say). Is there any way of doing that? | |
| Nov 22, 2014 at 4:03 | comment | added | Shane Madden StaffMod | @ewwhite Yeah, that's a fair point. I think easier access to systems is going to mean that'll continue to be an issue, and I think we can help to push those people in the right direction. It isn't happening everywhere, for sure - I just want us to make sure we're accepting of "both ways" instead of just the way we're used to. There's good we can do for the devops/cloud types. | |
| Nov 22, 2014 at 1:46 | comment | added | ewwhite | Yes, the devops/code-focused thing is happening... but it's not happening everywhere. Not everything is about hyper-automated web-scale systems. And that's not really the way the bulk of the industry (from my vantage point) is going. When I see questions that focus solely on that type of architecture, I wonder, "where are your mentors? Who is really responsible for the systems? And how did you get placed in charge of them?" It's like sysadmins have been erased from that landscape and the path of mentorship and learning basics is just over. | |
| Nov 22, 2014 at 1:15 | comment | added | Shane Madden StaffMod | @Wesley Fair enough - it's very hard to objectively measure if question quality has gone up or down, so I don't know. Maybe this is due to the cleanup load being spread among fewer people. In any case, this change doesn't purport to fix question quality directly - hopefully it'll be fixed indirectly by having the cleanup load shared better. | |
| Nov 22, 2014 at 1:01 | comment | added | Wesley | @ShaneMadden Interesting. I never heard about the jump in Google traffic. Personally I just started seeing a marked rise in really poor questions which was alarming, so I took to the downvote, VTC, and flag cannons. My completely unscientific guess about it all is that the poor questions increased, which slowly got people to become insulted and indignant which snowballed into the greater use of the only tools within our grasp to work with: downvote, VTC, and flag. That's how it was with me, anyway. | |
| Nov 22, 2014 at 0:45 | comment | added | Shane Madden StaffMod | I think the question volume and overall question quality has stayed largely the same, with a minor jump in poor questions. I think the ramp-up in question closure and downvotes since July is a reaction to a perceived increase in bad questions; since people heard we were getting more google traffic, they adjusted their perception of incoming questions to assume they were from the google hordes. Compare these graphs - if the google hordes brought the bad questions, as is the theory, why didn't the downvotes ramp up until long, long after the traffic spike? | |
| Nov 22, 2014 at 0:36 | comment | added | Wesley | @ShaneMadden Do you think the 850 questions a week we get right now are different in merit than they were in November of 2013? November 2012? Is the percentage of well researched and documened questions vs poorly researched and documented questions higher or lower than it was, say, four years ago? | |
| Nov 22, 2014 at 0:15 | comment | added | Shane Madden StaffMod | @Wesley I know that an increase in low quality questions is the perception, but I think it's just perception. If people are burned out they should take a break instead of just being angry, see the last paragraph here. | |
| Nov 21, 2014 at 22:12 | comment | added | Wesley | (Please don't take the word "hate" too seriously, because I can feel the clutchy-pearls types already buffing their pitchforks.) | |
| Nov 21, 2014 at 22:11 | comment | added | Wesley | TL;DR: We don't hate the game, we hate the playahs. =) | |
| Nov 21, 2014 at 22:10 | comment | added | Wesley | I don't really feel that a more code-focused system administration style is the problem here. It's a flat out failure to apply critical thinking and basic troubleshooting to a problem before someone asks a question that's the problem. We're not keeping the standard high, but caviling about how we can lower the bar more and pretend we're not. That question you posted would have been great if some research had been done and a more direct question formulated. It seems like people want to use ServerFault as a stateless IRC channel nowadays. PostSecret for button mashers. =/ | |
| Nov 21, 2014 at 21:59 | history | answered | sysadmin1138Mod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
