What are the requirements for this beta to graduate?

Question

From time to time I take a look at this website's statistics on Area51.
I see that most of the criteria is set to 'Good' & 'Excelent'. The only one that 'Needs work' is the answer percentage.
What does it take to have a 'graduation party'? All the criteria should be marked 'Good' or 'Excelent'?

Answer 1

I'm going to chime in here, even though I have only just come to this community as a newb. However, I do have a fair amount of experience on the stackexchange network, particularly in beta sites (both ones that eventually graduated, and ones that have languished in beta for years).

One aspect of site graduation that is sometimes overlooked is having a user-base with enough people with sufficient privileges to self-regulate.

A key aspect of this is having enough people vote, and, in all honesty, as a new member here, that seems to be something this site falls significantly short on.

A quick look at the most recent questions shows that the vast majority of questions are at 0 votes.

Out of about 4500 questions, only 22 questions have scores of 10 or more.

Out of 21 users with over 1000 reputation, 15 have voted less than 250 times, 8 of those voted less than 100 times, and 4 of those voted less than 50 times.

Voting, either up or down, is a very important, yet often-overlooked, aspect of a community's health.

I'm not suggesting you upvote low quality content, but I do believe there aren't enough votes being cast in general, and this is something that may slow down the development of your community. Generally, if a question is worth answering, it is probably also worth upvoting. Voting for other people's answers is just as important, if not more so.

Content doesn't have to be stellar to merit an upvote; just useful.

You've got pretty good site stats, for what that's worth, and the questions/day in particular is a good sign for a beta (in my experience, that's one of the hardest stats to hit "excellent" for). However, as Robert's blog post, linked in his answer here, mentions:

So from this point forward, the graduation date of a site will depend heavily on having enough users with sufficient reputation to properly lead and govern the site.

In my opinion, that's where you are hurting the most, and the lack of voting participation needs to be rectified in order to establish a community capable of self-governance.

Answer 2

There are a few minimum requirement to reach before a site can be considered for graduation. They are outlined here:

When will my site graduate?

But the blog post "Does this site have a chance of succeeding?" talks about not watching those Area 51 statistics too closely. They do not represent some sort of “report card” filled with pass/fail grades. We do not close down sites if certain areas continue to 'need work', nor do we simply graduate sites when everything lights up with 'excellent.'

That's not how it works. You're only concern should be to provide a great end-user experience to those who come here for help.

So when do we graduate?

Graduation basically occurs when we can determine that the site has become completely self-sustaining and scalable. We watch to see that the scope of the site is well defined. When an incoming user asks a question, there should be a reasonable expectation they will receive a good answer with plenty of vetting and ongoing quality improvement throughout much of the content. Graduation means the site has a proven track record of steady, sustainable growth with no sign of abatement. It means a core community has formed that can take care of and maintain the site through their own self-governance; that they can host successful moderator elections and the meta community is both engaged and responsive.

Graduation comes with a degree of "lock in". It means all the pieces are in place for continued and sustained success where quality, community, and growth can be maintained for as long as care to speculate on such things.

Answer 3

There is no definite requirements. The SE stuff is going through stats from time to time and graduated some sites which are doing good.

If site made all "Excellent" marks it is graduated automatically.

So we have to do a bit better job :) All except Marius. He is great!