I am relatively new to this SE site and I understand that it's still in beta so it can be closed. I also think this SE site should exist so we should do what's possible to move beyond beta.
What challenges stand in the way of moving beyond beta?
3 Answers
The rules have changed over the years. The most recent discussion I think is from 2015:
- When a site starts to consistently receive 10 questions/day, we’ll consider it for graduation.
- If a public beta site does not produce consistently helpful content, and lacks the caretakers needed for flags and spam to get handled and our Be Nice policy to be upheld, it will be closed.
Is your site in between these two categories? You don’t have anything to worry about. Regardless of how small the site might be, you have a home here in the SE network.
Basically, when they setup the Area 51 thing with follow, commit, private beta, public beta, and graduation, they thought only big sites could survive. What they have found is that little sites like cogsci.se can do just fine. That said, things keep changing and they have made it much harder to progress through Area 51 into public beta. They have also changed the styling of sites across the network to make things more uniform and allow themes and customization to be more easily applied (but I don't think that has panned out).
Area 51 shows the site's most important statistics. The largest bottle neck is really the low amount of traffic we have on our site; we have little questions and the #answers per question are limited. Lastly, the #answered questions is below standard. In all, we have too small a community to sustain a full site.
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3I think of those by far the biggest problem is the limited number of good questions. Although it's a criterion for area 51, I'm not as worried about the # of answers per question. I feel like on the more scientific stacks most questions tend to get just 1 good answer, and they attract additional answers if the only existing answer is poor.– Bryan Krause ModMay 16, 2019 at 21:09
