@iain out of curiosity, what's your metric for participation ?

+1, i think i agree with everything in this answer, which is almost unheard of ;-) The 'i came, i joined' section in particular is exactly my experience also.

@iain i can say from being in the position of having no seniors to ask myself that sites like serverfault are utterly invaluable. I'm glad this matter is being discussed on meta. That said it's always good to do research, though i know sometimes i'm not even able to grasp what i'm trying to search for so i imagine that happens to others also... and god knows i've got a ton of advice-needed type questions that i don't even ask here for being primarily opinion based.

@AndrewB my point of view is there needs to be more effort on allowing people to quickly find questions they both can answer and want to answer, and help visitors find questions they can help on - perhaps allowing the scope of the question to be stated at the time of asking. The reason i don't cruise the site as it's increased in popularity is due to not being able to easily find questions i actually care about, regardless of if the questions is good or not. In reality that means i need to be able to filter questions by people in my situation. As i said last week, "professional" isn't enough.

just chiming in for this: "Decisions are made by those who show up, and right now the people showing up seem to disagree with you". I agree with him, but i've found it's a lot easier to lower my usage of SF than fight against the attitudes displayed on meta.

@voretaq7 sure, but that doesn't mean anyone will care if you say 'no' or not. You can CYA i guess, but it doesn't mean you won't end up in such situations. I'm finding the number of times that happens to me is dropping as i gain experience and move upwards (therefore having more clout in conversations) but new admins probably have it happen often, i know i did.

"ignoring the fact that there are other more green people who might like to help them." This, exactly. As long as it's not a duplicate (and not way off topic like "how to fly an aircraft"), it's ok in my eyes. It's nice to pick off the low hanging fruit questions sometimes. My issue is more that finding those among the volume of questions that aren't my area of expertise is too tricky (and yes i'm pretty lazy... but i'm willing to bet so are most people who aren't emotionally invested in the site). I want to see only my favorite tags, really.

I think the intention is that questions are well researched before hand, and documentation read / understood. Which is great in theory, but i'd actually say this'll result in mostly corner cases and exceptional circumstance questions where the answers have narrow relevance to other visitors, reducing the usefulness to new visitors... but hey ho.

@platform, in a nutshell. sadly.

@thomas you're likely wasting your time.

... then let people filter the questions by ones which apply to their own knowledge without getting annoyed that the site has questions deemed below them. I'm not saying very basic questions should end up on SF, i'm saying SF and SU aren't actually disparate enough to need their own sites; Its been overly siloed. And there's been some retaliation against filtering options, but i've already got anything windows, active directory etc filtered out via tags as it's not my area of expertise, so why not business size ?

No, i understand that's what it's meant to be, but I don't think it'll actually survive being that way. I can only speak from personal experience, but SF at first appeared hostile to new users to me, and over time I've not been swayed to think otherwise. It's good that people can ask enterprise-y questions and all, but segregating them off into their own site is a bad call imho. It'd be easier to just ask the user at the time of asking the question what type of responses they want (i'm looking for SOHO advice, i'm looking for enterprise etc"). Hell, they do that for bounty questions.

I'm just saying, it isn't working because the premise is fundamentally flawed. "Enterprise standards" is largely meaningless. Not entirely, but enough to undermine the purpose of the site. All suggestions so far just involve raising the barrier of entry and lowering inclusiveness (which would nullify the key feature of se sites which made them attractive in the first place). But if you want to go down that route, you may as well just stick a monthly subscription cost on membership.

sure, but as much as it pains people, that is why the site stats are so crappy. The word "professional" is totally meaningless; e.g: I used to work in an organisation with 10,000 people, now i work in an organisation with 50. The way they employ IT isn't remotely similar. Put simply, the site is misaligned with what the public actually want, as evidenced by the fact that its doing so badly. I do get the pipe-dream that the site wants to be, but it's just not realistic to dictate what "professional" means. To be blunt, the actual impression put outwards is that SF is just SU for snobs.