There's been a lot of mentions that we're losing new question numbers and that we should do something to improve the situation on the site. How do you think we should do that?
Points of interest:
Post your propositions, or perhaps explain why none of this is really necessary :p
I had intended to write something up a week after the mod election, but then life happened. That's how life goes, but...
For those of us actively following the seasons, we could author questions that ask about plot holes with the series. Many of these can't just be figured out by watching the show (namely, a few of them in Alice and Zoroku), so I feel like questions like this would be beneficial.
However...I find myself largely agreeing with Hakase's point. Artificially inflating the questions asked count isn't going to accomplish anything. However, if we ask meaningful and impactful questions about current series (or even a few classics), then it wouldn't be artificial.
I want to stress, in an Anime/Manga ecosystem where most sites allow discussion, opinion, and conjecture on the front pages, we come across as very weird in that we only want verifiable facts or educated guesses at all, and there's no room for chit-chat. We're not going to attract the vast majority of casual participants here just by existing; we may have to look at what it took for other sites to sustain a following, like Movies and TV.
I still get the impression that we're looking for what suits our style best. We're a Q&A site that wants good questions and great answers. It'd be valuable to add more great answers (analogous to Aki Tanaka's proposal), but I think to get the ball rolling, we need to ask good questions, too.
I think we should improve the quality of existing questions with citations and encourage proper sourcing. We should also feature good questions as a role model of what a good answer is.
We should start focusing on the quality of answers and less on the quantity. No one is interested in a Q&A site where most of the information is quoted or copied from tertiary sources. Many of the top answered questions are well researched and/or referenced question with primary or secondary sources. Edits to grammar and spelling can also help improve the readability and eloquence of answers as well, encouraging more upvotes.
Let's work building and encouraging these types of question. It's understandable that this is a recreational stack site and users aren't as serious about participation. Our user base can be lazy at times, but can produce some impressive content when motivated. Lets start encouraging that.
I think we should start taking our answers serious. If we can demonstrate that we can provide quality answers, we can leverage the high page rank traffic we get from being a SE site to spread the word about us.
What we can start doing is getting together and finding gems of answers and award bounties. This will spotlight good answer that might not have gotten much attention and award rep to the user. Perhaps do this on a weekly to monthly basis, coordinated on meta. The answers could come from community suggestions and moderation staff picks (or both). It should be alright to award previously bountied questions as well since things can get buried as time passes.
I believe its best to focus on what we already have and do well and use that as a beacon to light the way for future content and users.
In my opinion, we shouldn't artificially inflate the "questions asked per day" stat by asking questions which nobody has asked before due to how simple/obvious the answer is. That would seriously bring down the site's quality and turn it into [something bad for very unintelligent people]. If a question needs to be asked, it will be asked naturally by others.
It's true that some of the more active series have ended for which people could have had questions, so I don't think it's unusual to see fewer questions these days. IMO it's just how it is and the site works perfectly fine in this regard.
