Let's get critical: Mar 2014 Site Self-Evaluation

Question

We all love Homebrewing 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!

BrianV · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-24 18:43:11Z

A bit of feedback - this self review is a bit of a difficult task on a StackExchange such as Homebrew, because many of the questions are very situational.

If someone asks a question that can be answered definitively, then it's easy to rate it. ie, 'How do you calculate ABV by a drop in specific gravity'.

However, Homebrew has a lot of other questions that are much, much harder to compare to Google. ie, 'Here's a picture of my Krausen. Does this look like an infection?'. At best, you can evaluate similar questions asked in forums and the answers, but this is much more difficult than evaluating answers to more factual questions.

If it was easy, I'd do it myself ;-) Thanks for taking the time to chime in - whether or not you think it helps, I remain confident that this is worth doing, just to stay focused on our strengths. — Shog9, Apr 7, 2014 at 21:28