TL;DR: I looked at some Data Explorer data for Stack Exchange's language sites. It seems
- we create a lot of answers compared to our peers (is this good or bad?),
- we really should be voting more (we're behind our peers), and
- we should be making more noise here on meta.
Data
Here's a snapshot of some statistics of Stack Exchange's language sites:
(total) (1-month period)
#Quest #Meta #quest #ans #votes (*)
up down
English.SE 108940 3279 890 1101 922 321
ELL.SE 71092 1013 1019 1146 627 162
Japanese.SE 20344 699 185 191 518 45
German.SE 12878 482 102 251 458 70
French.SE 9671 251 96 200 261 19
Chinese.SE <--- 7546 221 122 322 128 2
Spanish.SE 7010 416 112 186 217 4
Russian.SE 3908 158 31 68 133 13
Latin.SE 3332 130 66 99 275 7
Italian.SE 2966 135 34 49 218 14
Ukrainian.SE 1858 92 24 36 61 6
Portuguese.SE 1753 116 22 36 52 1
Esperanto.SE 1336 77 27 40 27 2
Korean.SE 1203 71 18 17 43 2
LanguageLearning.SE 978 161 7 11 18 4
ConLang.SE 279 49 6 10 8 1
(*) for a month starting 14-th November 2019 the number of questions an answers from this data explorer query, and for November 2019 the number of votes is from this data explorer query counts votes made within 31 days after the question was created.
With this data explorer query (and this modified version), we can find the average post scores per site:
average score
quest answer
ConLang.SE 8.51 5.64
LanguageLearning.SE 8.11 4.02
Latin.SE 6.46 5.23
Esperanto.SE 6.12 4.69
Portuguese.SE 5.82 3.94
Ukrainian.SE 5.79 4.21
German.SE 5.46 4.46
Russian.SE 5.13 3.70
Japanese.SE 4.54 4.14
Spanish.SE 4.41 3.45
French.SE 4.38 3.47
Korean.SE 4.20 3.00
Italian.SE 3.94 3.95
English.SE 3.90 3.49
Chinese.SE <--- 2.85 2.16
ELL.SE 1.88 2.54
(Further statistics are on Sites.)
Conclusions
Or at least, what I think we can conclude:
Recently, we've been creating a lot of answers. I'm not sure if that's is a good thing, or if this simply implies we create many "meh" answers.
We're probably not voting enough (see: Vote Early, Vote Often!). Other sites of comparable size cast more votes on fewer posts.
Scant nice questions/answers. In fact, searching for
is:question score:10
andis:answer score:10
shows that for posts made in 2019, there has only been one "nice question" or "nice answer" badge awarded (here).Hot Network Questions. There's a formula for question "hotness"
(MIN(AnswerCount, 10) * QScore) / 5 + AnswerScore ------------------------------------------------- (QAgeInHours + 1) ^ 1.4
Getting questions on the "Hot Network Questions" list is great exposure for the site (often resulting in 1000+ visits), but we can't hit it unless users upvote both the question and its answers shortly after posting.
Meta Chinese.SE seems a bit quiet. It's not a huge problem, but I feel users should be making more noise on meta: discussing if/how we're doing things right; coming up with creative ways to encourage participation, improve quality etc.