Why can't we raise up questions quality?

Question

I am a voracious StackExchange user, always I have a technical question I go to StackOverflow, also every morning I like to come here to programmer to read some more advanced questions and opinions about design stuff and programmer challenges (as opposed to programming challenges). I noted, a long ago already, that we have a great number of negative voted question. I can understand the motives. ^{1 2}

But why can't we raise up the quality of the Questions? Look at this chart I extracted from data.stackechange. It shows the ratio of down voted questions to total questions asked that year.

Despite its huge size, StackOverflow could, given the years control (and for some time, lower) the negative voted Questions. In Programmers in other-hand negative question have increased over the years (except in 2013-2014 period, where it appear to be controlled).

1. What can we do to help with the questions quality?
2. Are we already controlling better new posts in the review queue?

Answer 1

Part of it is trash questions, but there is also questions that are not in scope.

Right now the scope is detailed in Help -> Help Center -> What topics can I ask here?

Is it there? Yes. Is it good enough? Not really. If it were.. well then gnat's life wouldn't be as hard as it is.

That really isn't programmer's fault, thats just how all of SE is. It starts from position of assertion that you should read a help-center first. The fact that nobody does this hasn't been embraced yet.

Users learn what each particular site's unique interpretation of what is 'subjective' and what is off-topic by visiting one of the on-hold questions, or having one of their own questions put on hold.

So education usually comes after the mistake. SE might want to think about how to improve their UX in order to educate during question composition, instead of burying the scope three clicks deep or having to be linked to after a question is put on hold.

And yes I know this is already done when the cursor's focus is in the question title, but as we can see, that obviously isn't good enough.

Answer 2

We are inline with similar sized sites

There's an interesting chart there... but I draw issue at comparing P.SE to Stack Overflow. In particular, the size of the voting user base compared to the daily influx of questions can make most of the stuff on Stack Overflow get no votes at all (there's also a significant 'whine about down votes' and 'give sympathy up votes' (examples 1, 2, 3 (entirety of question in mouseover in case they are deleted)) culture on SO).

I wanted to see what similar sites to P.SE looked like - similar in terms of questions/day and overall size. This is what I came up with:

You will see that we are by no means the most down voting of the 30k or so question sites that I sampled (Gaming, Programmers, Electrical Engineering, Android Enthusiasts).

The question really is "what is EE doing right?" along with "what groups Gaming and AE together?"

The answer to this is likely the accessibility of the material to the 'common' person. The harder/less accessible the material, the more focused the site can be and clearly communicate that focus to people asking questions. Furthermore, the more difficult the material, the more natural it is for the person to have done the requite study of the problem before asking the question along with asking the question fully.

Judging from this, I would suggest that if we want to have fewer down voted questions, it is would be necessary to restrict our scope drastically such that we're closer to that of Theoretical CS or Server Fault in what is allowed or not and take fewer soft questions; requiring all the questions to be at the professional software architect level.

I'm not sure that would be the right thing to do.

Furthermore, there's the conception on other sites (Stack Overflow, I'm looking at you) that Programmers.SE is for questions without code or for getting opinions. One can reliably go and find belongs on P.SE type comments on Stack Overflow (data.SE) for questions that don't meet the desired quality. The questions get asked here, and down voted, and, well, that's what you see. I contend that it is impossible for P.SE to stop the problem as there are far too many with this misunderstanding of P.SE's scope on SO and the best we can do is close, down vote, and educate people who post here under those conceptions (and, again, that's a non-negligible portion of the ratio).

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Changing the name won't help

One reoccurring theme that has popped up over the years is "maybe if we change the site's name people will post on topic questions?"

I'm pulling up the current newest questions page and listing all the questions with a negative score:

• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/263077/help-understanding-this (-4) - a block of code with "what does this do?"
• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/263075/c-project-design (-3 on hold) - too broad (not off topic) "how do I understand C++?"
• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/263048/do-i-need-an-msdn-subscription-now-that-visual-studio-is-open-source (-3 on hold) - primary opinion (not off topic): do I still need MSDN?
• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/263043/when-should-i-use-arraylists-compared-to-hashmaps (-4 on old) - too broad (not off topic): "When should I use ArrayLists compared to HashMaps? Which is more effective, and for what purposes?"
• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/263023/how-to-make-triangle-in-nested-loop (-5 on hold) - off topic (failed to migrate to SO): I have a bug in this classic homework problem.
• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/263014/alphanumeric-addition (-3 on hold) (one vote for unclear): How do you solve crypto math problems?
• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/263004/what-should-i-describe-myself-in-my-cv-a-business-intelligence-developer-or-wha (-4 on hold) off topic: resume help - can I call myself a Sr. developer without the experience?
• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/263002/pseudo-code-of-3-digits-reversed (-4 on hold) Unclear: "How can I write a pseudo code of an algorithm that displays a given 3 digit number reversed?"
• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/262999/how-to-use-slime-indentation-with-editorconfig-in-emacs (-1 migrated) Emacs tool use
• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/262992/how-can-i-start-writing-a-apps-to-be-build-before-code (-3 on hold) too broad: how do I write an app?
• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/262991/code-snippets-website-app-with-integration-for-windows-mac-linux (-3 on hold) off topic (tool recommendation): "Is there a website where I can save code snippets"
• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/262980/what-is-the-most-minimal-web-app-stack-for-a-server (-3) off topic (tool recommendation): what is a good web stack to use for a severely underpowered machine?

It is my contention that absolutely none of these would have been not asked if the site's name was SoftwareDevelopment.SE or SoftwareEngineering.SE. Every single question there would still have been asked. Very few of them had off topic votes. General topicality is not the problem with the questions (specific bits of 'tool recommendation' and 'career advice' still is).

We are long past the days of "what is your favorite comic" or "what should I name my cat" and the like. Those questions don't show up. Programmers is understood to be a site about software development processes.

The off topic questions that we get now are ones that very closely map to the topic of software engineering, but are issues that we are not qualified (as programmers) to answer. Career advice and legal being the two biggest ones. We also regularly get polling questions, but that isn't an issue with the site name, that is a misunderstanding of the Q&A format itself (and a failure to read the tour which shows what is on and off topic).

But there will always be people that suffer from the "herp derp oh look a textbox" syndrome, and no amount of renaming the site or amending the FAQ is going to fix that. -- Anna Lear

Answer 3

Your data is inaccurate because SEDE doesn't account for deleted questions but anyway, there are few factors worth thinking of.

In the past, Programmers were getting a reasonable mix of good and bad questions related to careers, software recommendations and code reviews. Even when topicality of these was slippery, well presented questions about interesting, real problems were considered worthy of upvotes by many readers.

Nowadays, we lost a good part but bad part remains with us.

I mean, users capable of asking good questions in above topics, eventually find their way and stick to specialized sites - TWP, CR, SR.

• What is left to us are askers who want to ask but can't make a good question. They post (or cross-post) their stuff at Programmers, Stack Overflow, Yahoo Answers, anywhere, in a hope to find a kind soul to feed them. This contributes to lowering average quality of questions in these topics.

Another stream of low quality questions are those from users blocked / warned at Stack Overflow. Per recent stats, we're getting 4-5 delete-worthy questions a day from these folks.

In the past, they could pollute SO with their low quality stuff for months or even years but for last year or two, due to improvements in burning down SO close queue, they started hitting question blocks and warnings more and more.

• Per stats, Programmers appear to be most popular of SE sites among this category of askers. After being blocked or scared by warnings at Stack Overflow they simply try to dump their low quality stuff over here, thus also lowering average quality level.

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If honestly, I can't see what we can do to help with the quality of questions like above, nor how we can control these in review queue.

We can't realistically expect askers of bad questions to "refocus" to specialized sites because at these sites, such questions seem to be detected and rejected even faster than over here. This is probably because of clearer, narrower specialization regulars at these sites build a better sense of what is good and what is not (at least that's how I feel at TWP).

I also can't imagine how it would be possible to make users blocked / warned at SO stop their attempts to leak through Programmers. I can't think of a way to tell someone facing a block message at SO that they shouldn't try their luck at Programmers.

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Answer 4

Update for current page:

A look on the page of the first 50 newest questions counts:

24 questions are downvoted 13 questions are upvoted 13 neutral

This is a ratio almost 2:1 down/upvote