Let's get critical: Jan 2015 Site Self-Evaluation

Question

We all love Amateur Radio 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!

Kevin Reid AG6YO · Accepted Answer · 2015-01-25 02:10:36Z

This is what I think about the site:

The content and participation in the form of answers is fine.
There's a lack of people asking questions.

I suspect that a low absolute rate of activity is inevitable, because amateur radio is a small hobby and many of the people in it get their questions answered by talking to their friends and mentors — something we can't and shouldn't try to replace.

What I find a ready-to-hand comparison for “we should wish to do this well” is the Reddit /r/amateurradio question threads, which get 20-50 comments per week. Supposing half of them are questiony and half of them are answery, that's 10-25 questions per week. (Of course, some of them are repeats or off-topic for us — “Which radio should I buy?”.)

The only thing I see to do to promote the asking of questions is to advertise the site. Unfortunately, I'm new to the hobby myself and don't see any places where it would be appropriate for me to do so. (Oh wait, my todo list says I should be making a radio page on my personal site. I can put a link there. That's hardly much though.)