Random terribrilliant idea: ask all the FCC exam questions here?

Question

Horrible idea that's somehow too good not to try pull off. Also, probably already considered years ago. But here goes anyway ;-)

One of this site's biggest dings against leaving beta is that we currently have an average of 1.5 questions a day, instead of a healthy 10 questions.

Working against this, it seems that a significant proportion of naturally incoming questions have to be closed as "too broad" or "too shopping list" — so much of setting up and operating a ham shack seems better suited for forums than the stricter SE policies, e.g. "I have [QTH situation] and [equipment budget] and [personal interests], please share your opinions!"

So…

What if we filled this site in with every question on the FCC exam?

Answer 1

My opinion:

You are proposing posting questions and answers to increase a metric rather than to actually provide useful information. Don't do that. We're not a content farm.

As pretty much covered in the previous discussion of test pool questions — if something useful can be said in a question (e.g. my "Coaxial capacitors in line” in E4E04? for example) or answer about a test question, go ahead! But if you're just posting stuff to post stuff, that's bad, because it's not making the web better, and that's what we-who-care-about-the-site-itself should be seeking to do.

Answer 2

Pros:

• we get lots of questions
• said questions are almost tautologically "on topic"
• some of them could eventually lead to great answers and/or provide good cross-references to related "real" questions that get asked later

Cons:

• seems kind of a spammy thing to do
• could hurt our "unanswered questions" ratio at first
• "rep fairness" and simple profile honesty concerns, can we create a bot account for this and/or mark Community

Dunnos:

• would this violate any SE rules?
• how tedious would it be to expand the question body? (i.e. the exam question probably only provides the title, how would we flesh it out to a more detailed question)
• how tedious would it be to answer them? (again, we have the exam answer but that's a bit to terse for a proper SE answer…)
• how interesting are the FCC exam questions in the first place
• how likely is it people will be googling for these questions
• if it even matters, is anyone going to upvote these questions or answers?

I think we'd have to at least make judgment calls and plenty of manual intervention for this to work. "What is the purpose of a gin pole?" might make a good question, whereas "What is another way to specify a radio signal frequency of 1,500,000 hertz?" or "What is the current flowing through a 24-ohm resistor connected across 240 volts?" are a little silly in their raw form.

Answer 3

This sparks a discussion on the "defined lower limit of 10 questions a day to leave beta"

First of all, I do not believe that generating questions for the sake of increasing quantity is a good idea.

Second, while 1.5 questions / day seems low, this site has to compete with larger forum sites such as eham.com and qrz.com (and others) for traffic of questions. While these are forum/discussion sites they are more established and get a lot of postings of the Amateur Radio world-wide community.

This Amateur Radio world-wide community in itself is a small community, reality is less then 1% of any countries population is licensed. I realize the number will grow if you add "listeners" "CB'ers" and other "experimenters" to the number of licensed Amateurs, but still the number is very small.

I would question the validity of the set definition of "10 questions / day" for smaller communities such as Amateur Radio.