Encourage asking more questions on this site?

Question

I have read this question(by Braiam):

What's our status in voting?

I want to thank him for his work, It is very good and show the advantages of this site over similar sites.

However I'm so exited to be a part of this site, and I guess this site will be improved more in the future thanks to slm, terdon (moderators) and a other active people, but I guess the problem that we faced in this site is the lack of questions:

• we only have (till now):44,784 questions
• super User has: 227,662 questions
• Ask Ubuntu has: 161,741 questions
• Server Fault has: 178,223 questions

So what do we have to do to encourage sharing and to encourage migration of questions to this site to make it more popular?

Finally I'm just suggesting ideas, you are the professionals here, but I really want this site to be one of the best in the SE community. So are there any other ideas on how we can improve the situation?

Answer 1

I sympathize with what you're saying, but if you look at those graphs that Braiam posted one thing you should be noticing is that they're all trending up. This IMO, is a good thing and will continue to grow if we keep doing what we've been doing here since the site's inception.

• Keep the community friendly
• Look for holes in the existing Q's, if you find something lacking, ask it and then self answer it
• Introduce Q's that you've personally experienced along with the solutions you came up with
• Look for interesting technologies that are under represented here and learn how to use them, then write a Q&A about it
• Continue to improve our existing back catalog either through...
  • retagging efforts
  • updating things as they become outdated
  • improving things that have evolved (MBR vs. GPT for example)
• Be the best community member you can be

The last bullet is really what makes a site great, again IMO. If everyone is trying to help and doing what they are best able to do, then a site will invariably shine.

High numbers of Q's doesn't equate to a high quality site. High quality Q's with high quality A's does, along with people that are genuinely trying to help each other and newcomers.

Answer 2

Popularity is not an end in itself, it should be a by-product of a high quality reference site maintained by a knowledgeable and approachable community.

Personally, I don't think that there is a "situation" that needs "improving." That isn't to say that the site can't be improved, it just means that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a slow, deliberate build up of quality questions and answers rather than a frenzied scramble to create as many questions as possible to try and attract new people.

Adopting the long view and paying attention to the details to ensure that the site grows in a sustainable way strikes me as a much more sensible approach. That means investing as much time in "janitorial" tasks with the current content; editing, tagging and re-tagging, identifying duplicates and weeding out the cruft, as it does creating new questions and answers.

That way when new people do arrive here, they will find a well curated and maintained wiki and will be more likely to be inclined to contribute to the commons by sticking around and helping out.

Answer 3

One thing that we can do to engage more activity is write up your own findings in a Q & A format. I always do it most of the times. For example,

• Question 1

• Question 2

• Question 3

This way, I try to get some expert opinion on whether I have understood things correctly.

Another way I try to increase the question count is, when I try to answer some user questions and not clear of some approach, I would again post them as questions.

• Question 1

Also, if I read something and not clear, I would post them as well.

• Question 1

So it is basically upto the individual to engage himself in the community, so that it helps the community as well as the individual.