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According to this entry Number of questions for qualifying in commit stage:

" We increased the requirements to slow down the number of sites that were being created that don't have all that much support to begin with."

Increasing the number of required questions seems like a blunt instrument for reducing the speed at which proposals escaped the commitment phase. But it seems like the target of 40 questions is pretty steep even for some promising proposals, especially since not many users care about Area 51 and the ones that do are limited to 5 questions.

While increasing the number of questions helps make a proposal more mature, why not allow passionate users to create more questions for voting around that proposal instead of just 5.

I believe that some proposals would have a much better chance of making a solid site if there were more questions to vote on. Since Area 51 flipped to the classic up/down vote system from the trinary voting system, there doesn't seem to be much reevaluation on how many questions a person can ask per proposal.

Why not increase the number of questions a user can ask per proposal to balance against all the changes made with Area 51 engine and to help make better proposals?

Those questions will still have to get votes.

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  • The two proposals that I follow (Stack Overflow in Spanish and Atheism/Agnosticism) don't have that problem. Actually, they have the opposite problem: then have enough questions, but not enought people voting them. So I think that some proof of your affirmation that the problem is about the number of questions and not about the number of upvotes is needed.
    – Pablo
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 10:26
  • @Pablo - I disagree with your assertion that those proposals you listed could not be aided by more questions. So show some proof of your "affirmation". First off, Spanish is about to pass, and Atheism could clearly use more questions. Atheism is also a special case since it's a closed proposal, and Spanish Stack Overflow needs little help with definition. It's stackoverflow is Spanish, I think even Stack Exchange's least savy users know what that proposal would mean. The goal is help definition not to railroad those proposals through commitment.
    – Mark Rogers
    Commented Nov 23, 2012 at 15:01

2 Answers 2

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The changes to Area 51 are designed to require a broader base of users to support the founding of the site. In previous iterations of Area 51, too few people have been able to push a proposal through, creating a site that struggles… usually irrecoverably.

This would only allow fewer users to do more work; the opposite of what we are actually looking for.

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I'm new to how all this works, but if I understand things correctly, it seems like more questions actually just splits the votes up more and makes it LESS likely that as many will attain the desired 10 votes.

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  • It's 40 not 10, and no this won't make it less likely if anything because there appears to be a greater problem of insufficient questions now.
    – Mark Rogers
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 3:34
  • Isn't it that 40 questions have to have 10 votes?
    – balanced mama
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 3:42
  • Oh yeah I didn't read your comment correctly my bad. But the point still stands.
    – Mark Rogers
    Commented Nov 22, 2012 at 15:37

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