What's the average score for questions in 2019?

Question

Recently I posted an update which asked

UPDATE Sunday 23 June, 2019 […] Is it just me or has the quality of questions by new contributors dropped even further? Is there a way to measure this statistic?

Furthermore, speaking purely for myself, I have greatly reduced the number of contributions I make to the site because of LQQs and …blah, blah, blah …

Well, I have found the query that tells me the answer. It ain't good news.

   English Language & Usage

 

Compare those results with

   Worldbuilding

 

and with

   Puzzling

 

What about Stack Exchange's flagship, how is that faring? Oh, much worse, much worse but it is by no means a consolation

   Stack Overflow

 

Thoughts and prayers? Yikes.

1. Can anything be done to stop the erosion of quality on EL&U? Is it too late? Can we come up with a good idea that will foster better and/or more interesting questions?
2. Why is the community upvoting fewer questions? Why are fewer hi-rep users posting questions? (Don't all look at me)
3. Does the blame lie solely on Low Quality Questions (LQQs) or have we become a jaded and cynical band?

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As for EL&U's ‘oldest’ post, it was migrated from Stack Overflow on March 13, 2012 but first asked Jun 16, 2009 and it just turned 10 years old. Sugar, we should have thrown a party.

Answer 1

1. Can anything be done to stop the erosion of quality on EL&U? Is it too late? Can we come up with a good idea that will foster better and/or more interesting questions?

Easy solution: confirm my swr HNQ hypothesis. Then consider the option to ban swr from HNQ. In the new HNQ system, the mods have the authority to remove questions from HNQ. A community consensus could be reached to authorise mods to remove any swr question from the HNQ. This is a good option because it will push other interesting ELU questions to HNQ.

2. Why is the community upvoting fewer questions?

This is not an indication of fewer upvotes in absolute terms. For that, we would have to look at absolute vote numbers. As an extension, we could look at vote numbers by active users (for each year consider only users active in that year) and plot over time.

3. Does the blame lie solely on LQQs or have we become a jaded and cynical band?

Without having looked carefully at the data to support this, I think this is a sensible hypothesis. Furthermore, there's a domino effect. If quality goes down, other things go down too (fewer new users with subject experience stick around, settled users leave or are less satisfied than they would otherwise be).

Answer 2

We need to accept the fact that the only way to significantly reduce the flood of low quality questions is to not allow users to post until after they’ve earned some reputation. That, however, has unwanted side-effects and is not within the community’s power to implement.

I don’t think getting rid of the low quality questions is as important as attracting and elevating the sorts of questions that are desirable. Some sites do scheduled events to generate and promote content or encourage a particular activity. Maybe organizing an event for the community will work better than Mari-LouA trying to single-handedly to seed the site with quality questions.

I don’t know exactly what that event should look like- whether it should it be asking questions, or finding gems in the rough, or swarming the low quality questions to get them closed- the important part is to get the community rowing in the same direction and making use of the power we do have to affect the site. If the community doesn’t respond, then we have a better idea where the problem is, and can start working on some community building solutions.

Mi Yoda has a “best answer” contest, why not a “best question” contest? It probably shouldn’t be score based, but maybe nominated and voted on in meta, to avoid the HNQ effect?

There is no silver bullet that will solve this problem in one fell swoop. The underpinning of a healthy SE site is the community that curates the content. If it’s too small and the amount of content coming in is too much for it to handle well, that’s a problem. If it’s large enough to handle the content, but everyone has different ideas about what kind of site it should be, that’s a problem. If there are a lot of members, but they aren’t engaged with the site and actively curating content, that’s a problem. All of those problems may have similar looking symptoms and completely different root causes and solutions.

I don’t know the solution, but neither does anyone else. We have some guesses, but until we actually try something and see what impact it has, we won’t know. Trying something will give us more information about the problem than speculation ever will. It doesn’t matter if it’s this specific idea, but we need to organize a committed effort to attempt some incremental step toward solving some aspect of the problem instead of trying to come up with the perfect solution in theory.^* It will be easier for us to try things if we start with things that we can do as a community without much assistance from the SE team.

_{* Yes, the programmers here will think “Hey, that sounds like Agile”. I am in fact a certified scrum master. I am willing to either Kanban or Scrum the shit out of almost anything}

Answer 3

I'm not contesting your observation that question quality is dropping, but I'd like to offer a different view of the data. As @ColleenV notes,

It’s interesting that the trend is always down, probably due to older questions having more opportunities to get voted on, although how fast it drops varies.

so I thought it would be worthwhile to check how 2019's questions are doing compared to, let's say, the situation for 2018's questions on June 23rd, 2018, and so on. That's what this SEDE query does, and the trend is indeed downwards. Also, Roomba hasn't yet cleaned up abandoned questions from 2019, which might influence the average (SEDE doesn't take deleted posts into account).

As for the other sites in your question, Worldbuilding shows an upward trend, Puzzling's progress seems to have stalled and Stack Overflow is (very) slowly going down.

Answer 4

Can anything be done to stop the erosion of quality on EL&U? Is it too late? Can we come up with a good idea that will foster better and/or more interesting questions?

Why is the community upvoting fewer questions? Why are fewer hi-rep users posting questions? (Don't all look at me)

Does the blame lie solely on Low Quality Questions (LQQs) or have we become a jaded and cynical band?

I have a few suggestions.

1) I like Mari Lou's idea of showcasing answers, and suggest that you might want to go further by taking a stab at fulfilling the goal of providing a source of definitive answers on the English language and its use. Right now searching is limited mostly to strings, making it hard to find answers suitable to questions.

Thus, individuals with expertise in a particular area might want to curate the questions and answers in a given area and provide a summary article with links to the relevant q&a's. This amounts to writing an annotated Table of Contents for a book and filling in the content with links to existing material.

How to do it? Maybe like this:

--The volunteer for a particular chapter creates a question (or the question is asked by an account called "English Enthusiast") and answers it himself or herself. The question and answer define the topic, cover misconceptions, and break the topic down into subparts with introductory/summary material and curated links to good questions and answers.

For example, supposed John Lawler could be persuaded to answers sometime like "What's with these modal verbs, anyway?" This answer then defines modal verbs, covers misconceptions, and goes on to explain. (What is a modal verb and what's happening to them?) (Ten things about modal verbs your ESL teacher got wrong)

Etymology (and the major fallacy: what you don't know about etymology that can hurt you) is another topic someone could take on that's not so broad that it becomes impossible to handle. Inevitably the "answer" is going to include a list of links to other questions.

Another Q: I'm determined to use a, an, and the properly--but I also want to know when I can go naked.

(I think a little humor or jazz is important; the audience is, after all, probably under 25.)

Developing a list of people willing to take on a slice of what's already on EL&U, and discussing how to circumscribe the "chapters," is the first task. But the whole thing need not be done at once.

The virtue of the above is that it follows the standard SE format of q&a. A link to an overview document on the questions asked by "English Enthusiast" could be placed on meta. It would also reveal areas of weakness where new questions needed to be asked. Second answers would be available for additions and updates.

2) The LQQs generate a lot of work. Possibilities to reduce them:

a) Refrain from answering the questions in a comment, even to help out and then vote to close. It is so tempting. I am guilty, guilty, guilty. If I don't do it, someone else will. And one wants to help. Yet, it gives the drop-ins exactly what they want: a quick (and usually quite expert) answer. I know tchrist campaigned on this for a while and gave up. But no one really disagrees about the consequences of feeding stray cats.

b) Automate the closing of questions by closing anything that's been open and unmodified for 48 hours and has nothing but "off topic" and comments--or something to that effect. Get from the in basket to the out basket not necessarily faster but with less work.

EDIT

3) Consider, while resolutely ignoring questions that don't belong on the site, opening up a little in terms of what's on-topic. Some questions come up about how to become more fluent in English, what to read that's fiction without too much dialogue, good references on, e.g., grammar, the meaning of vocabulary or phrasing in current political debates, and the like. Some of these posters are potential contributors, and current contributors have a lot to offer them on these topics. This can be managed by upvoting a question and answering it even though it's a bit of a stretch. EL&U, assuming it survives, will look vastly different in five years than it does now; how do we let it morph?

Oh well.