#Overall Impression I joined into this site as it has a lot of cross-over from physical fitness stack exchange, especially with diet and such. I saw the quality of posts on here and encouraged by the volume of posts per day I set to work on flagging and answering.
After a few weeks I have noticed a few things, good points first:
- There are a lot of newer users (<200 rep) answering questions.
- The appointed mods (JohnP looking at you) that are reasonably active in their moderation.
- There are a lot of questions being asked.
- Some of the questions are brilliant, and the OP's are keen to challenge answers put forward. For example: http://health.stackexchange.com/questions/7543/uti-bacteria-climbing-up-urine-stream
Onto some 'areas for improvement' or 'opportunities':
- The middle ground of users with experience from 500-5000 are non-existent. Where are the regulars?
- The moderator queue is just not being touched regularly enough
- The high level answers don't seem to have references often and users think that a unreferenced answer is okay.
#Userbase It appears that the active user base for SE at the moment is a mix of Indians, British and Americans (some Canadians). There is a clash with the British evident. As a Brit, I get free healthcare from qualified professionals in a accredited building 24hrs a day 7 days a week, 365 days a year, I just have to pay a fixed price for prescriptions. Americans and Indians do not have that luxury and I think this is the reason we get so many "please diagnose X" questions; because the users want to see if a easy fix is available to them to save them a buck (or rupee).
Of course, all of the above paragraph is pissing blindly off a cliff so I may be wrong. But you asked for my impression and there it is.
#Moderation The appointed moderators are tip-top, no issue there. The community rep-appointed moderators don't exist in a large enough number to moderate the volume of posts coming through.
#Meta Discussion What meta discussion? I asked a question a few days ago and it has 16 views and no answers. That is pathetic for the question volume/visits on this site!
#Tags/Wiki Tags are in pretty good shape, lots of sensible options available, the wiki for those tags is pretty bare-bones though.
