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Comments on How can we grow this community?

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How can we grow this community?

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Codidact's communities have a lot of great content that is helping people on the Internet. Our communities are small, though, and sustainable communities depend on having lots of active, engaged participants. The folks already here are doing good work; our challenge is to find more people like you so we can help this community grow.

This calls for a two-pronged approach: reaching more people who would be interested if only they knew about us, and making sure that visitors get a good first impression. I'm here to ask for your help with both.

Reaching more people

The pool of people interested in languages (and language) is large, from linguists to people learning new languages to students. My question to you is: where do we find those people? You're the experts on this topic, not us. Where would it be most fruitful to promote Codidact? How should we appeal to them to draw them in?

Please don't give general answers like "universities". We need your expert input to decide where, specifically, we should be looking. We are now able to pay for some advertising -- where should we direct it, and what message would best reach that audience? Can you help us sell your community?

Finally, some types of promotion are best done peer to peer. You are the experts in your topic; messages from you on subreddits or professional forums or the like will be much more credible than messages from Codidact staff. For these types of settings, we need your help to get the word out. If you know of a suitable place and can volunteer to spread the word there, please leave an answer about it so we all know about it (and know not to also post there).

Making a good first impression

Pretend for a moment that you don't know anything about Codidact. Visit this community in incognito mode. What's your reaction? If it's negative, what can we do about it? Some known deterrents from across the network:

  • Latest activity is not recent. This tells people the community isn't active. Anecdotally, we have lots of people ready to answer good questions, and on some communities, not enough good questions for them to answer. Can you help with that?

  • Latest questions are unanswered. This tells people it might not be worth asking here. Why are our unanswered questions unanswered? Are they poor questions in some regard? Unclear, too basic, too esoteric, just not interesting? Can they be fixed? Should they be hidden?[1]

  • Latest questions have poor scores. This tells people that either there's lots of low-quality material here or the voters are overly picky. If it's a quality problem, same questions as the previous bullet. If good content is getting downvoted, or not getting upvoted, can you help us understand why?

These are issues we've seen or heard about from across the network, but each community is different. What do you see here? What might be turning people away, and what could we do about it?

Are there things about the platform itself, as opposed to content, that discourage people we're trying to attract? If there's something we can customize to better serve this community, please let us know. If there are other changes in presentation or behavior that you think would encourage visitors to stick around, what are they?

Conversely, what is this community doing well? What draws newcomers in? I don't just mean the reverse of those bullets. What do we need to keep doing, and what might be worth highlighting when promoting this community?


  1. Should the question list not show some questions to anonymous visitors? What should the criteria be? ↩︎

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I am active on the Linguistics Stack Exchange but would really like to leave there completely. I see this site as a potential alternative, but haven't become active here yet. So in a way you could say I am one of those people that are you are trying to get a hold on :) Here are some observations.

Etymology questions

Whenever I visit I see a lot of questions in the etymology tag. Often these questions give just one example of a word that shifted meaning (rather than a couple of words that follow the same pattern), though there are exceptions (https://languages.codidact.com/posts/281087). This doesn't look good:

  • They look highly similar. Right now there is a number of questions that are all framed almost exactly the same: "How did word X shift to mean Y?" I would welcome some variety.
  • If we take one as an example, it looks like the poster has done very little work to attempt to get to an answer themselves. The concepts of seeing and knowledge are related in many languages. In English: "I see what you mean now"; "let's look into this"; etc.
  • It is well-known that words change meaning continuously. So really what I wrote in the previous bullet point is all you need to write an answer: show that the concepts are related more frequently, and optionally explain at a cognitive level why: because humans gain knowledge through sight. Now, I might be tempted to write one answer like that and explain a little bit about these kind of cognitive processes, but I'm not going to write 10 answers to what is essentially the same question.

Note that etymology questions have been a nuisance for others as well. It would help a lot if we were able to ignore tags somehow, although this doesn't help with the first impression of course.

Perhaps it is an idea to expand the online etymology resources post with information about sites like Wiktionary and also some guidance and examples for people to help them answer their own etymology questions. Then I would suggest we can close most of the etymology questions with reference to that page, and are left with those questions where the poster has put in more work and has a more specific question.

"Languages", not "Linguistics"(?), and events

There are very few general linguistic questions. Questions of the type:

  • How do I draw a syntax tree for ditransitive verbs?
  • How is passivization accounted for in Davidsonian formal semantics?
  • Is there a useful cross-linguistic definition for the category of adverbs?
  • Do consonants tend to be more stable historically than vowels?
  • How does recursion work in highly agglutinative languages?
  • Is there a universal list of semantic roles like Agent, Patient, Instrument, ...?

It has just been my assumption that there is no point in asking questions of this type since there is no relevant expertise. But maybe this assumption is wrong.

Maybe it's an idea to organize (bi)weekly or monthly events to promote a certain subfield and encourage everyone to ask (and answer) questions from that field, even if the question did not naturally arise? For instance, January could be promoted as Phonology Month. This could be announced in a meta post, which also collects all relevant questions, and those questions are invited to add a small link at the bottom to the event as well (for visibility). In an event like this, someone may be more inclined to write up a question they wouldn't post otherwise because there may not be enough expertise.

Advertising: LINGUIST list

If you want to reach professional linguists, the best way is to send in an item to the LINGUIST List. This is a high-volume newsletter announcing books, reviews, conference calls, jobs, and more.

In all honesty, I think advertising there now would not give a good impression, because of all those etymology questions. Japanese pronouns is an example of the type of question that might be interesting to this audience: it looks at one particular language, but frames it in a wider discussion. And of course there are fine language-specific questions that some will find interesting (e.g. רכב vs. אוטו), if they are familiar with the language. The absolute and relative number of questions like this will have to be much higher before I can recommend this site to my colleagues, or before it will be useful to advertise on the LINGUIST List. (I may already recommend it to students of some languages, like Modern Hebrew and Spanish, that seem to be well-represented here.)

Design

This is not site-specific, but I would suggest removing the vote counts, or at least reduce their size, in question lists. I think the red/green meter looks great, and I don't need to know the exact vote counts on the front page. See current page; mockup with small font; mockup without vote counts. Now suggested on general meta.

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4 comment threads

How did word X shift to mean Y (2 comments)
The main problem is that there is no activity in other fields (8 comments)
Please bring up non-site-specific suggestions on Meta (2 comments)
For now, I have featured the etymology resource for visibility (1 comment)
The main problem is that there is no activity in other fields
Moshi‭ wrote over 2 years ago

Rather than the etymology questions being too rampant, I feel that the main problem is that there is no activity in other fields. If, say, we ignore the etymology questions, then the last activity here was almost a month ago. Clearly something has to be done to increase participation in other fields, but right now I'm drawing a blank.

Keelan‭ wrote over 2 years ago

That’s a good point. What do you think about the events I mentioned? Apart from subfield events you can also have events for specific languages, of course.

Jirka Hanika‭ wrote over 2 years ago

Keelan, those events could be an interesting experiment and I don't have any prediction over whether those would solicit many further questions. I could perhaps ask you likewise: Your post contains six "general linguistic questions". What made you decide not to ask any of those? And I am not contemplating to ask a batch of questions with existing answers elsewhere just so that we have some artificial content, but it might be the case that some of them are real questions. At our current frequency of traffic, people "vote" about their preferred content not so much by actual voting, but rather by posting anything worth other people's time in the first place.

Keelan‭ wrote over 2 years ago

Jirka Hanika‭ I also don't have any prediction, but I know that Wikipedia has similar events to improve coverage of some field, and I vaguely remember something like this from Stack Exchange but can't find it now.

What I tried to explain in my post was that the reason I would not post such questions is that there are no such questions yet, and hence my impression is that there is no expertise to answer them. An event would encourage artificial questions, which has disadvantages but one of the advantages is that one may be more inclined to just post and not think about whether there is expertise or not.

Of course, actual content is the best indicator of the kind of site we want to be. But it might be that there are lots of people with expertise in some subfield who are all not posting because nobody has done so yet. An event would be a way to get that information out in the open.

Moshi‭ wrote over 2 years ago

I guess it's a catch 22; the lack of such questions discourages you (and I presume others) from asking those questions in the first place, and the community doesn't diversity. That was kind of what I mentioned in my own response, actually. We need to be more visibly accepting of a more diverse range of questions.

Jirka Hanika‭ wrote over 2 years ago

I'm very neutral on what questions will/should be asked. I only care about questions that did get asked. I'm more likely to join a coverage event if one is organized than to initiate or organize one myself. Coverage events are a smart idea but having at least a small group of people interested in every particular topic is essential for its success. Voting on meta could perhaps be used to gauge that in advance.

Keelan‭ wrote over 2 years ago

I was thinking about that too. If there is interest, we could open a meta post to collect ideas for coverage areas in answers and draw the top voted one whenever we need a new one.

Jirka Hanika‭ wrote over 2 years ago

I consider the upvote count of your answer a proxy measure of such general interest. I like your idea of drawing the entire community already into the stage of idea collection. It will be great if you decide to spearhead this (after a few more upvotes here, I guess).