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According to the site's Area 51 profile, we have just passed 11.4 questions per day.

enter image description here

The ones that aren't in green are percent of questions answered, which is 89% (90% is the green threshold). The answer ratio is the other criteria, but I personally think that that's not as important to this site. If the answer is "this is what the US Constitution says", there isn't really any real reason to have more than one answer.

For reference, sites like Movies, Motor Vehicles and Repair, and Raspberry Pi have graduated without reaching one or both of these requirements.

So does this mean that the site has met the criteria to graduate? If not, what more needs to be done?

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    If it were up to me, I'd graduate the site today - if only for the glorious drama a moderator election on a site about politics would offer. ;)
    – yannis
    Nov 10, 2016 at 21:52
  • @Yannis - I'm not sure I agree. I'd put money down that it will probably be the least exciting election on the whole network, with at least 2 of 3 current moderators winning easily (3d one is new and has less public exposure as a mod, so less of a sure bet).
    – user4012
    Nov 11, 2016 at 1:25
  • @user4012 Well then, I promise I won't run so at least one diamond goes to someone new.
    – yannis
    Nov 22, 2016 at 20:57
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    @Yannis - Totally understand desire to get some respite. But it will be a loss to the site, imho.
    – user4012
    Nov 22, 2016 at 21:07
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    And two weeks later, we are back to 6.4 questions per day.
    – Philipp Mod
    Nov 28, 2016 at 13:46

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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The short version of the current policy on site graduation is (emphasis mine):

  1. When a site starts to consistently receive 10 questions/day, we’ll consider it for graduation.
  2. If a public beta site does not produce consistently helpful content, and lacks the caretakers needed for flags and spam to get handled and our Be Nice policy to be upheld, it will be closed.

As Phillip already noted, this is probably just a spike and we shouldn't get our hopes up.

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    Does Area 51 not show the questions/day rate consistently? If not, how would someone judge whether or not the site is consistently receiving 10 questions/day?
    – Thunderforge
    Nov 10, 2016 at 22:46
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    @Thunderforge It's the average of the past two weeks (check the tooltip that appears when you hover over the number). As for finding out historic averages, you could try SEDE - if SQL doesn't scare you that is. Note that SEDE is updated once per week.
    – yannis
    Nov 10, 2016 at 22:53
  • Here's a SEDE query that looks interesting: data.stackexchange.com/politics/query/509889/…
    – yannis
    Nov 10, 2016 at 22:55
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I agree with has been commented: US presidential elections has make this site be quite busy during last weeks.

See for example a graph on number of questions, answers and accepted per week:

enter image description here

Questions, answers and accepted per week is a fork from the original query Site Activity and VoteGraph (Plot the site activity by voting, questions, answers and comments, aggregated per week).

Also the number of new users per week has risen dramatically and we are starting to see some decline already:

enter image description here

All together, it shows how well the site has been doing throughout the USA elections, getting some hot network posts every day. Funnily, not many Announcer badges were awarded, so I suggest people to start sharing the useful posts in here.

Politics in every country have moments of peace and moments of noise. If the site just focuses in one country the number of questions is going to fluctuate too much. If we have a wider focus and check Politics in the whole world, the amount of questions may become stable.
Remember there are always elections in different countries, so a goal would be to also focus on them whenever they happen.

From Global Elections Calendar for example:

  • what may happen in Somalia since they are in a constant civil war?
  • what is the analysis on the outcome of Bulgaria and Moldova's elections moving towards Russia?

Kudos to the mods, I am sure they've been quite busy lately!

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No. Graduation is an executive decision by Stackexchange management. There is not ironclad rule about when a site graduates.

Personally I wouldn't give too much on this number. We are currently experiencing a spike of questions regarding the recent presidential election in the United States. We still need to see if this will attract new users who will still be asking questions about other topics in a few months from now.

IMO a site should graduate from beta when it has built a large community with consistently high activity.

Update Nov. 28: We are back to 6.4 questions per day. As I thought, it is still too early to consider this website graduation-ready.

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