Last Call
I'm going to do it. I'm going to shut down this evaluation sometime next week. If you listen to the latest podcast you'll know that we will soon get a new evaluation system in the review queue. I'm thrilled with that plan and I'd like to wrap up our current evaluation. We are growing (albeit slowly) and I think a big part of that is we have lots of attractive content for Google to point people to. Let's keep up the good work!
Our sister sites have undergone self-evaluations this year, but we haven't. I asked our Community Managers (basically the people that Stack Exchange has hired to make sure all the sites are working out) if we were going to get one. Officially, we are "still pretty small", so we aren't likely to get one soon. However, they did offer to supply us with the sample of questions1 for us to do our own evaluation.
Our mission as a site is to make the internet a better place to find the answers to questions about the Bible. That means that we must be discoverable by search engines2 and our answer must be of better quality than other sites.
For each question listed below:
- Search the internet for the question as if you were the asker!
- If our answer(s) is good (complete, well-written, answers the question, useful, found in search results, etc) then vote it up!
- If our answer(s) is bad (incomplete, poorly-written, off-topic, incorrect, unfindable, worthless, etc) then vote it down!
- Comment with anything you feel is worth noting, or to explain your voting choice. We have a rough guide to better/par/worse right here. If your result is par, make a choice to vote up or down.
Remember that our goal is to make the internet a better place. If you find yourself unable to decide how to vote, ask yourself: does this question and/or answer make the internet better? How you answer that question should determine your vote.
Notes:
Please be honest with yourself when you evaluate questions. Since we initiated the process, there's no reason worry about a lot of downvoted questions—Stack Exchange, Inc. isn't going to shut us down because of this evaluation or anything like that. In fact, we can do a lot to show we care about this enterprise by being self-critical.
If you find anything to fix in these questions, go ahead and edit, vote, comment, flag, etc. I'll try to keep track of what changed and list them in the answers below.
I will include my own commentary from my run of the review. These are in spoiler blocks. It's up to you whether you look at them post-fact just to see how your perspective compares, versus letting my views shift your opinion of the question.
Another thing to look at is if the question and answer(s) encourage the people who find us to come back to the site. It's a bit of a fine line we walk because our strength is a very narrow focus on an esoteric topic, but we don't want to be just speaking to ourselves. Should we be embarrassed by question, answer, and comments on the site?
Come to the Library to chat about the evaluation. I'll be available pretty much all next week if you have any questions, suggestions, etc.
Footnote:
Usually, they give 10 questions randomly picked from the set of open, answered questions from 30-40 days ago. But since there were only 9, we get all of them. And yes, that's a sign that we are "still pretty small". That's not a bad thing as long as it lets us focus on quality. ;-)
Google is obviously the X pound gorilla in the space, but it's not the only option.
