Timeline for Does the number of answers really drop over years?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
30 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 15, 2020 at 5:55 | history | edited | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added specific query as suggested in a comment
|
| Apr 14, 2020 at 5:24 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | @მამუკაჯიბლაძე I have edited the queries a bit. (I hope I did not leave any mistakes.) The results with omitting these two tags look now rather similar to each other. | |
| Apr 13, 2020 at 13:12 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | @MartinSleziak thank you very much for this additional information! I would say filtering out tags does not change much, while excluding cv even makes the trend more apparent! | |
| Apr 13, 2020 at 12:50 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | @WillSawin I have tried to add some queries which should make the effect of big-list questions lower. (Namely queries looking only at non-CW posts/questions, and queries omitting questions with some specific tags.) | |
| Apr 13, 2020 at 11:58 | comment | added | Gerry Myerson | @Will although not every big-list question gets a lot of answers, e.g., mathoverflow.net/questions/348992/… and mathoverflow.net/questions/345263/… and mathoverflow.net/questions/343943/… and mathoverflow.net/questions/341954/… and mathoverflow.net/questions/339005/… .... | |
| Apr 13, 2020 at 6:14 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | @WillSawin Yes, this could explain why there were so many answers per question initially. But for the later times, when one goes from more than one to less than one answer per question, I am not so sure. In any case I agree that it would be more accurate to exclude questions with the big list tag. | |
| Apr 13, 2020 at 1:34 | comment | added | Will Sawin | Could big-list questions possibly contribute a significant amount to this effect? There were a lot of those in the early days, I believe. | |
| Apr 11, 2020 at 12:10 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | @MartinSleziak Good idea, added | |
| Apr 11, 2020 at 12:09 | history | edited | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე |
edited tags
|
|
| Apr 11, 2020 at 9:59 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | As a side note perhaps (answers) would be a suitable tag for this post. (Since you're mainly interested in the statistics for answers.) | |
| Apr 11, 2020 at 7:56 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | Maybe it is worth reminding that people with sufficient reputation (and moderators) have access to site analytics, where they can also see some stats about activity on the site. | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 14:12 | vote | accept | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | ||
| Apr 10, 2020 at 12:23 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | Could you please add this to your answer? Another simpler and probably also useful thing to look at would be a query like this but just with $f(q)=$ the number of answers to $q$. This should drop in any case since recent questions are unanswered yet, but will probably show something about dynamics | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 12:22 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | @MartinSleziak Great! The last one looks reassuring: it shows that still questions get more than six upvotes for their answers on average, so I believe one can say that answer quality (if not quantity) remains high enough - although it also seems to slowly drop | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 12:17 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | Unless I made some mistakes, this query should return $f(q)$ for each question, and this query should be average score of answers depending on the month when the question was posted. (This only takes into account the date when the question was posted, not when answers were posted, but usually these dates are near to each other.) | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 12:05 | answer | added | Joseph O'Rourke | timeline score: 3 | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 11:38 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | @MartinSleziak For a question $q$ let $f(q)$ be the total number of upvotes that all answers to this question get (probably including negative numbers for downvotes). Then what I meant was the mean of the numbers $f(q)$ for all $q$ in a given time block. But I am not at all sure this is a meaningful thing to look at, this is just the only refinement that came to my mind. | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 10:47 | answer | added | Martin Sleziak | timeline score: 7 | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 9:47 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | ... divide this by the number of questions posted in the same period, to get some kind of (Answer upvotes)/(Questions posted) ratio? (I'll at to the above query that it also included the votes on questions which are older, it looks at votes depending on when the vote was cast, the question might have been posted long before.) | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 9:46 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | Would you be willing to clarify what you mean by "measure number of answer upvotes per question"? (If it becomes too long, we could try to clarify the details in chat, for example, in my room or in MathOverflow room. It is possible to count the number of all upvotes cast in the given period of time, for example, this query. Did you simply mean to ... | |
| Apr 8, 2020 at 1:41 | answer | added | Gerhard Paseman | timeline score: 2 | |
| Apr 7, 2020 at 18:39 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | @MartinSleziak Great, thanks! After all these upvotes do not interfere much, and maybe even supply additional information | |
| Apr 7, 2020 at 18:31 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | It is possible to link to a query including parameters filled out, for example in your link I can add period=91 and points=40. I suppose this would help others to see better what you're actually doing. (Since they would see not only the picture include in your post, but also how you obtained the graph.) | |
| Apr 7, 2020 at 17:38 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | @ToddTrimble maybe; still the fact is that there were always more answers than questions before 2016; while, after mid-2018, there are always more questions than answers. | |
| Apr 7, 2020 at 17:36 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | And I believe the queries you link to here show roughly similar picture, don't they? Also, could you explain more about deleted posts? | |
| Apr 7, 2020 at 17:34 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე |
@MartinSleziak that query is by Sam Saffron, as modified by Neal Young. The only thing I did when I forked was to delete the third component (about the number of upvotes) and then run it for 91 day batches from the beginning (i. e. first time when anything is nonzero). From the little I understand, the query just counts the number of posts without ParentId (questions?) and posts with a ParentId (answers?) over each batch.
|
|
| Apr 7, 2020 at 17:29 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | Is an explanation what the query linked in the post linked in your query calculates available somewhere? What parameters did you use to get the graph in your post? | |
| Apr 7, 2020 at 17:28 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | Maybe I am doing something wrong in my SEDE queries, but I do not see decrease in number of answers. Here is my SEDE query and a corresponding query including deleted posts. | |
| Apr 7, 2020 at 17:25 | comment | added | Todd Trimble Mod | I think in the early days, there was a lot of low-hanging fruit for easy picking. | |
| Apr 7, 2020 at 17:13 | history | asked | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | CC BY-SA 4.0 |