Referring to the information on Area51:
90% answered is a healthy beta
At this moment we have 70%.
- Should we give a bounty to others people questions?
- How effectively get rid of bad questions to increase this ratio?
asked Sep 14, 2015 at 18:21
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1See this question for another benefit of private beta bounties.– HDE 226868Sep 14, 2015 at 19:09
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Thank you. This answer seems to be interesting: meta.stackexchange.com/a/200527/302524– Pawel GumielaSep 14, 2015 at 19:26
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2 Answers
We are four days into private beta. Focusing on stats, especially Area 51 stats at this point is only going to drive us crazy. Our goal should be to have quality questions and quality answers for when public beta begins.
Area 51 statistics are (decent) guidelines, but they do not have have to be met. For example, the recently graduated Software Recommendations has an "Answered" percentage of 58. That's well below the recommended 80%. They, however, focused on other aspects of the site and achieved graduation.
Quality, not quantity, has been Stack Exchange's guiding motto. I'd rather leave a question unanswered than provide a low quality (or even wrong) answer.
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Thank you. I just wasn't sure about requirement of those guidelines. I did not mean answering questions only in order to increase this ratio. It would be strange. Sep 14, 2015 at 19:12
Adding on to Andy's answer, Software Recommendations recently graduated with an unheard of answer rate - 58%.
We were able to do it because we focused on quality, not quantity. See my answer here for my thoughts on the subject when the site was young:
I detest this statistic for this site. In fact, I like it rather low. Yes, if it was 40% I would be worrying. But if it was 90%, I would be suspicious that most of the questions here were too easy - not scoped well enough to be specific.
In my view, the reason this number is low compared to other sites is that we want very specific questions - and sometimes (often!) software simply doesn't exist that fulfills all the requirements people put in their question. This is a good thing, as it means our questions are very specific!
The vast majority of my feelings on that translate over to this site. We need to have specific questions if we're going to survive. Question quality first, then answer quality and count. Good, specific questions bring a smaller amount good answers, while overly broad questions bring a larger amount of bad answers.
We get to choose. I'd highly suggest we choose specific questions over answer count.
