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I have seen that this is the next step and that we have 5 weeks max to do it, but preferably in 1 week. What even are the requirements though? I saw the "How can you help PDLI make it from Private to Public Beta" but it doesn't say the hard requirements. How is a self sustaining community measured? What are the numbers? How do you measure a "healthy volume of high quality questions and answers"? What is considered high quality and what's considered a healthy amount?

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There's an answer here on Meta Stack Exchange by former staff member @TimPost. The first sentence is the most important:

I hate to put even arbitrary numbers out there because folks tend to fixate on the numbers instead of the exercise itself.

The purpose of a private beta is to show that:

  • The topic has enough interest to succeed
  • The topic works pretty naturally within the framework of objective Q&A
  • High-quality, original information about the topic is abundant after a short private beta period.

It's the third one that requires a bit of interpretation on our part. If a site has 150 questions with answers that just paraphrase Wikipedia, that site has a problem that would probably cause it to (at the least) be held back in private beta for a while longer.

If a site only manages to get 40 questions but they all have fantastic, in-depth answers, then we'd be very inclined to give it more time and see what happens.

If a site only manages to get 30 - 40 questions, and the quality is just not that great, then we'd probably be letting them know that it just didn't work.

I've watched and participated in a couple of private betas, but it's been a while since I've seen one with 130 questions in the first two days. So chances are very high we'll make it to public beta.

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  • $\begingroup$ From what I've seen so far, and as someone with genuine but somewhat outdated topic expertise, this site is currently failing #3 big time. It's full of basic, overly generic questions from people trying to rewrite Wikipedia or textbook chapters. $\endgroup$ Commented May 20, 2023 at 22:28
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There are not really any public hard numbers, and the approach by SE to new sites has also changed over time, so a lot of information is outdated as well.

It's a bit early to judge, but the volume looks good to me, I don't think that is likely to be an issue here. The volume on private betas tends to drop a lot after the initial burst of activity as you have a limited pool of askers in the private beta.

When I looked at the site initially I was a bit worried about question quality. Quite some posts looked rather superficial and not at the level needed for people actually designing programming languages. It looks a lot better now, there are more in-depth answers that appear to look like there are enough experts here.

I'd focus on quality, I don't think this site will have a volume problem. But I suspect there are potential issues with this topic and bike-shedding. A lot of questions around "why is X designed like Y" allow for easy answers and opinions. That has the potential to lead to bad quality answers easily if unchecked.

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I found some information. Not a complete answer though. Information is accurate as of 15:55 5/19/23 UTC. So we need 150 high quality questions to advance, although it is still unclear how high quality is defined. We currently have 162 questions:

Key

O= Open

X+ = Question score of X or higher

AX+ = Answer score of X or higher

Score above

Score Number
Total 162
0+ 150
1+ 144
2+ 141
5+ 89
10+ 20
20+ 3

Open and Score above

Score Number
Total 162
0+O 145
1+O 140
2+O 137
5+O 88
10+O 20
20+O 3

Answer score

Score Number
Total 162
A0+ 424
A1+ 388
A2+ 309
A5+ 119
A10+ 22
A20+ 1

This looks pretty good high quality which I expected is defined as 1 or 2 or more and open.

Next metric is interest and showing that it works with the Q&A format. I have no idea how the latter is shown, but we seem to be doing fine. As to the former, I don't know how interest is measured. However, I would assume Area 51's 10 questions per day would be a good guess. We have 50+ questions per day, so excellent on that front.

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  • $\begingroup$ I have taken care of that @mousetail $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 4, 2023 at 11:25

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