Summary
- 90% Answered: Our Area51 %Answered metric should read 90% by May 31st 23:59 UTC.
- Improved Voting Economy: The Electorate badge should have been awarded 15 times total by May 31st 23:59 UTC.
- Badges: Every 24-hour UTC period from May 1st - May 31st with at least three active bounties counts as a success.
Relevant posts: Spring Cleaning 2013, advanced search filters (more), voting strategies, how to write a good answer, vote early vote often.
Spring cleaning
As I announced for the first chat event, I think our site should make a coordinated effort of cleaning up the site during the month of May. While we had some very productive discussions during the chat, we didn't actually manage to cover much ground for me to base this announcement on, which, as I said in the summary, is mostly my fault.
In any case, I want to move on this project, so I'm going to try to provide some goals and a general framework, make some suggestions, and encourage people to post their own answers. There will be a 'halfway discussion' at some point from the 14-16th of May to go over how we are doing, and to discuss any ideas that have come up during spring cleaning, as well as whatever other topics people have.
Goals
Spring cleaning has two complementary purposes:
- Signaling a discrete period of high site engagement to formerly active users who have gone passive for whatever reason.
- Improving CogSci's Beta metrics, user participation/retention and general site quality.
(The first goal is basically achieved with this post, success notwithstanding, but I wanted to list it explicitly.)
To make these abstract goals tangible, I am setting the following concrete objectives for Spring Cleaning 2015.
Goal 1: 90% Answered
Target: Our Area51 %Answered metric should read 90% by May 31st 23:59 UTC.
Since late March, we've gone from 77% to 82% on April 19th, and then from 82 to 84% in less than two weeks more. A lot of the early gains came from serial closing nearly everything in our 'question purgatory,' true, but recent gains have primarily come from new answers. It's not a low bar to set, to be sure, but there is every possibility that we can reach the Promised Land with only a little elbow grease here!
To raise the chances we will meet this goal, I am personally setting off time to write two answers a day on average through May. It would be nice if a few other regulars would join me in making a (smaller, I would expect) public commitment, but I will do it regardless of what happens.
This is the most important goal, but also the most labor-intensive to contribute to. We should heed Jeromy's suggestion from my original spring cleaning proposal two years ago: answers don't need to be perfect to contribute substantial value to the site, they just need to be good. Another thing to keep in mind is that pursuing negative answers (i.e., answers which affirm that no answer exists) can be a strong strategy here, because most of the work goes into the preceding literature search, which can easily be done in bits and pieces. I suspect many unanswered questions have a negative answer.
Goal 2: Improved Voting Economy
Target: The Electorate badge should have been awarded 15 times total by May 31st 23:59 UTC. We each get 30 votes every day, so this can be accomplished by any user within the month.
I've talked about our voting economy before here. Votes are as important for an SE site as high quality questions and answers are, because the vast, vast, vast majority of people who come to this site are not in a position to evaluate the merits of an answer in any way except votes.
Relative comparisons with other Stack Exchange sites notwithstanding, the SE framework imposes an objective framework on every SE site. Answers go grey when they reach an absolute score of -3, regardless of what -3 means. Questions and Answers are "good" for SE's definition of "good" at an absolute score of 10. We can't change these things, so our voting economy needs to reflect them. (I doubt we can actually reach this ideal distribution, but it's as tangible a collective voting goal as any.)
Presently, I think it's reasonable to say our voting economy does not reflect these norms. In other words, we need more upvotes and downvotes both. Downvoting answers cost rep, but it's a miniscule -1 reps, you can downvote 10 answers for every upvote your answers get. If you don't have time to write answers, try to vote early and vote often.
Goal 3: Three Bounties
Target: Every 24-hour UTC period from May 1st - May 31st with at least three active bounties counts as a success.
Bounties are not that expensive in terms of reputation, and are a great way to signal site activity. Bounties are also effective: I have set a half dozen bounties on my own questions or ones I simply found interesting in the past month, and all of them received a satisfying answer. If you're a previously active user sitting on thousands of rep, who doesn't have time to answer questions and doesn't have time to vote, finding questions that deserve a bounty is a great way to help the site.
