Let's get critical: Dec 2013 Site Self-Evaluation

Question

We all love Spanish Language 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!

In my opinion, there is a lack of tags, and could be an issue that some tags just exist in english, and some tags just in spanish. — Guillermo Gutiérrez, Commented Jan 28, 2014 at 13:44

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-04-13 12:53:50Z

These questions seem... basic.

I note that about half of the questions on this sample could be worded as:

Spanish for X

This sort of "phrasebook Spanish" question is probably ok in moderation (at least one of my 7 questions is of this type), but the bread and butter of the site should be questions like:

Significado del prefijo "para-" en palabras compuestas

This question digs a bit deeper into the language than advice about what words to choose. It turns out the answer could work for languages other than Spanish that borrowed the prefix from Greek. However, I did learn something that I couldn't have gotten from an introductory class.

Traffic is picking up.

On a more encouraging note, traffic is definitely picking up in the last few months. Perhaps the reason is that people are beginning to find the site via Google, which is one of goals of a Stack Exchange site. We want people to find answers to those long-tail questions. It's kinda impressive that this site is the top result for acaso o a caso and guapa, for instance. That means people are going to keep coming to this site. Let's make sure that they are intrigued by other questions if they poke around here.