Is it possible that EL&U has reached or could at some point reach a "mature stage?"

Question

Note: This question is somewhat open-ended and prompted more by curiosity than any sort of actionable problem or idea. It seems to me like an interesting discussion topic, but if people view it as unclear what I'm asking, too broad, or off-topic for any other reason, I will understand.

The question came to mind while I was thinking about tchrist's question: What can be done to bring up site quality?

I'm both interested in the perspective of users who have been here for a long time, since the early days of EL&U, and in the thoughts any user has about how a site like this moves through different stages.

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As with any topic, there are some questions about English that are "frequently asked." They are the questions that many people wonder about and search for online. In the "grammar" branch, many of these questions are addressed by sites that write content seeking search engine traffic to promote their brand or make ad money, like Grammarly, Grammar Girl, dailywritingtips.com and the like.

Simply by virtue of mathematical probability, those questions were often addressed early in EL&U's history, and create many duplicates.

According to this SEDE query, the most frequently duplicated questions on EL&U are:

• How do the tenses and aspects in English correspond temporally to one another?

• When should I use "a" vs "an"?

• Is there a correct gender-neutral singular pronoun ("his" vs. "her" vs. "their")? - 17th question asked on EL&U

• What's the rule for using "who" and "whom" correctly? - 19th question asked on EL&U

• Are collective nouns always plural, or are certain ones singular?

It shouldn't be too surprising that these highly duplicated questions are all very early questions and, in two cases, among the first 20 questions out of over 91,000. Their frequent duplication is not because "more time has passed" since they were written (logically speaking, that would ignore the fact that had the questions not been asked, their first duplicate would, theoretically, replace them in that rank). It's because they are questions that people wonder about a lot and as a result they got asked very early.

I know, none of this is surprising, but I just wanted to make that point before moving on to speculate about how this trend affects the experience of answering questions on EL&U over a wide span of time.

As the site progresses, the questions asked that are on-topic and not duplicates are increasingly likely to be obscure, to the point that we might imagine their obscurity being pinched up against some vague, blurry, unreal boundary where there are no more on-topic questions left to be asked. Of course, that scenario ("all on-topic questions have been asked--let's pack up and go home!") is never really going to happen to any subject, but the increasing obscurity of novel questions is certainly more likely to be a problem with a subject as relatively static as the English language (relative to, say, Stack Overflow or Computer Science).

So my question is, essentially, could this phenomenon be related to tchrist's observation that more questions are getting closed? Are there certain tags that are becoming more clunky than others over time? By my observation, it seems that many of the most upvoted questions today are etymology related or single-word-requests--both categories that, to some extent, are less burdened by the limits of obscurity. Is that noticeably different from what EL&U was like over different spans of time? Or am I extrapolating too much from the extreme examples of very early and very "frequently asked" questions?

Answer 1

Our aim is and always have been to build a library of detailed answers to every question about the English language and its usage.

Unlike other, say, tech or science subjects, the changes happening to the English language may not be easily noticeable enough to warrant more or frequent new questions here.

So I for one do think that we might run out of fuel sooner than other stacks before reaching that imaginary finish line. We still have a long way to go, so fear not.

1. More questions are getting closed, and for a variety of reasons.

More and more people are signing up to the internet, googling for answers, finding out about ELU, asking the same everyday questions, and so on.

2. Certain tags are becoming more clunky than others over time.

The more people and questions we have here, the more tags that end up disorganised, and since the current user base is not too keen on reorganising tags, the whole thing can seem clunky or ehh.

3. Most upvoted questions today really are etymology related or single-word-requests.

They happen to hit HNQ real quick, and bring in the cavalry of upvoters. Of them, some choose to add to the chain of SWRs, because it's fun and well-received in most cases. I bet some people might even think ELU is actually a place mainly for SWRs than anything else.

4. Noticeable difference from what ELU was like over different spans of time.

I have been lurking on ELU for a very long time, even long before I signed up 4 years ago. ELU answered a lot of my everyday googling. Only noticeable difference to me personally is the absence of Barrie England. I loved reading his quick answers. They were short, lacking most of the links or definitions we require now, but were good, nay great nonetheless. He's unintentionally one of the many reasons I decided to sign up.