2

I'm carrying out some research on Stack Overflow. As part of the research I want to develop an app that visualizes change in SO over time. However I need to establish useful and meaningful metrics. The premise here is that metrics suggested by an external analyst are less meaningful than metrics devised by the community. It is based on the idea of being inside or outside a system. What is considered meaningful is different for those inside the system than for those outside. The tool I want to build is for the community and not for a social scientist or internet researcher.

So, with this in mind, has anyone any tentative suggestions on measuring SO? Things they would perceive as useful, correlations etc. I hope to base any measurement on a temporal scale so there is the possibility of establishing points of change.

P.S.: Here is an interesting post about devising metrics and community algorithms for the blogosphere. If I need to put this in StackApps, please let me know.

0

1 Answer 1

1

I can think of a few metrics:

  • Total Questions
  • Total Answers
  • Questions Per day
  • Answers Per day
  • Percent Questions Answered
  • Number of users
  • Number of tags
  • Number of questions in each tag over time

Those are just thrown off the top of my head.

2
  • Cool, thanks Justin. I first floated this last Summer (I'm a PhD so got side tracked trying to understand my topic for a while). Some suggestions were "I'd like to see which tags get the most votes (in terms of average votes per question or per answer)." AND " plot of users who receive more reputation than they give and vice versa." Slotishtype Jul 23, 2010 at 13:45
  • 2
    @slotishtype: You could use Stack Exchange Data Explorer to get some of your metrics. Jul 23, 2010 at 13:59

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .