Timeline for Industry Specific Tags - What Should we Do?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
16 events
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| Sep 11, 2013 at 6:43 | comment | added | jmac | (as reference, the same thing happens a lot in SO -- I visited SO initially looking for answers to a basic Google Visualization question, and ended up asking my own, and eventually becoming the top contributor to that long-tail tag. By having a good resource that isn't quite perfect, it creates an incentive to have people fill in the gaps) | |
| Sep 11, 2013 at 6:41 | comment | added | jmac | The long-tail stuff is important in the long-run, and I think the best way to grow that resource is to have someone looking for a solution to their long-tail problem, find our mid-tail broader answer, and ask a question that is more specific but not a duplicate. The best way to do that is to have resources that cover the general issue, and give people an incentive to ask a question here that digs a level deeper. If they read an HBR or Forbes article they are at a dead end. If they read a question here, they can follow-up. That is where our long tail could come from. | |
| Sep 11, 2013 at 6:09 | comment | added | jmort253 Mod | Okay, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks for clarifying. On the topic of how to handle future questions, what we'll have to determine is whether or not broadening them helps provide more value or whether it hurts by eliminating the possibility for the more targeted answers. I support experimentation to create real working examples of posts we can use to evaluate this experiment, to determine whether or not we may be inadvertently eliminating the long tail questions that are the core of SE's mission. Hope this helps! :) | |
| Sep 11, 2013 at 6:01 | comment | added | jmac | Sorry, you're right, I wasn't clear enough on that part. For questions where the (best) answers address the broader issue, the question can be pared down to remove industry-specific details without affecting the answers and making it more accessible to the general working population. If the best answers are based on those details, we should leave them. The goal is more toward future questions, and whether we should make an effort to broaden questions when possible to get more people capable of answering/more useful answers for more people. | |
| Sep 11, 2013 at 5:33 | comment | added | jmort253 Mod | I'm not 100% sure I understand. So here are two questions @jmac. Do you see the answers as not answering the exact question, and editing as a tool to make the questions match answers? Or are you proposing editing questions to justify changing the answers themselves? | |
| Sep 11, 2013 at 4:41 | comment | added | jmac | I didn't mean to diverge too far into the scrum thing, my point is that many of these questions are not limited to the extent they are scoped to. I think we'd have a better resource if we actively tried to broaden questions to be more applicable. Having the word 'scrum' in a post isn't a mortal sin in my mind, I am just worried that questions which scope themselves as related solely to a small group will end up getting answers that tacitly accept that assumption and result in a worse resource for others. | |
| Sep 11, 2013 at 3:28 | comment | added | jmort253 Mod | For this one, workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/11635/…, I feel that if scrum were missing from this post, I don't think anything would be lost. Of course, at the same time, I don't see having "scrum" in the question as being harmful. It's just another keyword to possibly help people find the post via Google. The takeaway for me is that specifics aren't harmful, but adding in more general terms may help the Q&A reach a wider audience. | |
| Sep 11, 2013 at 3:26 | comment | added | jmort253 Mod | @jmac - The thing is, for workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/12362/…, Scrum is an agile methodology, and seeing the notes from a recent session could tell me as an interviewee a lot about the company, such as how true they adhere to scrum principles. As someone familiar with these processes, a lot of context could be lost if the question were just about a meeting in general. | |
| Sep 11, 2013 at 3:16 | comment | added | jmac | Most of the scrum questions don't actually have to do with specific scrum issues. Of the 8 questions marked scrum, the only one I think actually relates specifically to the software industry is this one. Things like penalty for being late to a meeting could be just as applicable for any mandatory coordination meeting. I just don't want to pigeon-hole questions too much. | |
| Sep 11, 2013 at 3:09 | comment | added | jmort253 Mod | In short, I do agree there are instances where some editing could help improve SEO so folks searching for "punctuality" and "creative profession" could find the site. For instance, "How can I encourage a culture of punctuality in creative environments, where programmers, designers, or artists work?". | |
| Sep 11, 2013 at 3:08 | comment | added | jmort253 Mod | Hi @jmac, you're right that the type of work may not matter, I'd say limiting this could make it more difficult to actually ask a question on the site. However, it may be possible to subtly edit the questions to show how they could apply to other fields after the fact. As for scrum, it's a very specific type of meeting, one that may be different enough to where it shouldn't be lumped with meetings in general. However, a specific scrum problem may fit better on Project Management SE. | |
| Sep 11, 2013 at 2:55 | comment | added | jmac | (Disclaimer: I am not a software engineer, do not work in the software industry, and may not fully understand the unique concept of a scrum as it applies to daily work. At the same time, when reading the above questions, I think the advice would be the same in each if the concept of a 'scrum' were replaced with 'meeting', and probably improved for it because the focus would be on the broader issue than a specific subset of the broader issue) | |
| Sep 11, 2013 at 2:51 | comment | added | jmac | I think that a lot of the audience here are software professionals, and that the quality of some answers suffers because people tunnel in on specific aspects unique to the software industry. A search for scrum, for instance, provides a bunch of different questions: 1 2 3. Does referring to a scrum add any additional value to the questions, or to the responses they get? | |
| Sep 11, 2013 at 2:45 | comment | added | jmac | I fully agree that making a distinction between 'creative work' and 'shift work' would be appropriate and help provide better quality answers, I just don't think the type of creative work is going to have a major impact on a majority of questions. For instance, "How can I encourage a culture of punctuality in a software company?" would be a more accessible question if it were "How can I encourage a culture of punctuality with creative professionals?" The software industry tag serves to limit the audience in my opinion. | |
| Sep 11, 2013 at 1:06 | history | edited | jmort253Mod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Sep 11, 2013 at 1:00 | history | answered | jmort253Mod | CC BY-SA 3.0 |