Evaluating the Question of the Week

Question

There have now been four instalments of the Question of the Week, and it's time to review that. Going forward, we should decide:

• Do we want to continue with a Question of the Week? If so:

  • What can we improve?
  • Should we switch from a weekly rhythm to another cadence, e.g. monthly or bi-weekly?

Background is that the community participation has been … spotty. Some weeks seem to have been fairly popular, but other weeks saw little participation outside of a core group. Understandably, there have been repeated calls to terminate the QotW.

My personal opinion is that the QotW is doing OK but not great. Participation seems to be highly dependent on the phase of the moon, but has consistently been at acceptable levels for this to continue. I'd just wish more people would post suggestions.

Aggregated Data for Discussion

Links and notes on influencing events:

• 1: question, timeline.
• 2: question, timeline. Significant other meta discussion during this week, didn't become hot meta post until mid-week.
• 3: question, timeline. Was made a featured question.
• 4: question, timeline. Featured call to action to vote for the question itself.

Question votes over the week:

Q | S M T W T F S S | Total | Views
1 | 3 2 0 0 0 1 1 0 |     7 |   210
2 | 1 1 3 3 0 1 1 0 |    10 |   195
3 | 4 1 0 0 0 0 1 2 |     8 |   219
4 | 8 1 0 3 0 0 1 0 |    13 |   174

_{Votes taken from the question timeline, views read from the sidebar. Votes after the end of the week were not considered. Note that views are not shown over time, and therefore also include views after the end of the week.}

Final vote distribution on answers:

Q | #A | Answers
1 |  3 | 6, 5, 4
2 |  4 | 5, 3, 3, 2
3 |  3 | 6, 6, 3
4 |  5 | 8, 4, 4, 3, 3

Suggestion count per user:

9, 4, 1, 1

Answer 1

I think it is worth running this initiative for a month or two more (and then re-check again).

Lately site community does pretty well on quick removal of inappropriate questions and as a result site front page shows mostly on-topic, reasonably solid, interesting questions. (Those less familiar with site history can take a look here to compare how it was different in not so distant past.)

This naturally gives us more opportunity and time to reflect on good questions, what makes them good, what makes some of them better than others:

Questions that are well-written, interesting, reasonably-scoped, and illustrate the kind of subject matter we'd like to see on the website.

So far it looks interesting and useful, at least to me. Studying question-of-the-week suggestions and explanations given for these helps me better understand what makes a good question at this site.

^{Not to mention how much better it feels compared to the past when we were breaking our minds on why site is so polluted with coding help and career advice mess.}

I haven't made up my mind on whether it is desirable to keep this activity for really long term but for next month or two I would really appreciate seeing it going on.

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Speaking of too few suggestions, while your concern looks reasonable it is also worth taking into account that making these takes non-trivial effort.

First, one needs to carefully check quite a lot of questions prior to suggesting one. For example search shows 40+ "candidate questions" for this week, and it hasn't yet even ended. Next, one need to write a compelling explanation for why they believe the question is good, it is also not easy.

One thing that can maybe make it a bit easier to suggest is to provide readers with search parameters and URL to look through potentially worthy questions posted during the particular week, for example like this: created:2017-02-05..2017-02-11 closed:no locked:no score:1