Let's get critical: Sep 2014 Site Self-Evaluation

Question

We all love Japanese Language Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.

The Site Self-Evaluation review queue is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter. Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.

Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? Post an answer below to share your thoughts and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!

Answer 1

This is the first site self-evaluation I've done since joining this site. Many questions here are on a very specific topic. This is, I guess, the nature of SE sites: they are better for short questions on a specific, well defined problem rather than broad discussions. This is not necessarily wrong for me.

What was new to me though is how the questions were presented in Google search. As per instructions of the evaluation, I tried searching for the questions. Now, if I tried something similar to the question title or containing the key words from the title, the question was high in ranking. If I made my Google query a bit more general (which wasn't easy in some cases), they questions disappeared from the search results.

Is this just a by-product of the way the SE sites work or is it something that could be worked on? Is it hindering discoverability of the JL site?

Answer 2

Final Results

• What is the correct syntax for large numbers in kanji?

Net Score: 13 (Excellent: 14, Satisfactory: 4, Needs Improvement: 1)

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• Does 友達 have the plural marker たち "built-in"?

Net Score: 13 (Excellent: 13, Satisfactory: 4, Needs Improvement: 0)

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• Causative form + te form + another verb construction

Net Score: 11 (Excellent: 12, Satisfactory: 5, Needs Improvement: 1)

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• difference between 歩く and 散歩します

Net Score: 9 (Excellent: 10, Satisfactory: 8, Needs Improvement: 1)

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• What is this 10^40 thing?

Net Score: 7 (Excellent: 7, Satisfactory: 10, Needs Improvement: 0)

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• Confusion with the の particle

Net Score: 5 (Excellent: 7, Satisfactory: 8, Needs Improvement: 2)

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• What does [可愛が]りたい mean and how to use it?

Net Score: 4 (Excellent: 6, Satisfactory: 8, Needs Improvement: 2)

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• [因果]{いん・が}: A bass-ackwards contraction?

Net Score: 3 (Excellent: 7, Satisfactory: 7, Needs Improvement: 4)

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• Adnominalisation (Relative clause - noun - copula structure): What does it mean? How can we translate it?

Net Score: 0 (Excellent: 4, Satisfactory: 6, Needs Improvement: 4)

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• I do not understand the meaning of として in this sentence

Net Score: -4 (Excellent: 3, Satisfactory: 8, Needs Improvement: 7)

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