Let's get critical: Feb 2013 Site Evaluation

Question

We all love Computer Science - Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.

The Site Evaluation review queue is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter. Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.

Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? Post an answer below to share your thoughts and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!

Answer 1

Each of the ten questions could be declared "Excellent", "Satisfactory" and "Needs Improvement". The system calculates a score by substracting the "Needs Improvement" votes from the "Excellent" votes.

In November, this was the result based on 18 participants:

• 5/10 questions in [7..10]
• 4/10 questions in [1..5]
• 1/10 question with -1

In this latest feedback, we had 23 participants again, voting:

• 4/10 questions in [11..14]
• 3/10 questions in [2..5]
• 3/10 questions in [-6..-1]

So, arguably, our active users think we perform bad on more questions, but somewhat better on some.

Answer 2

Totals for the Nov 2012 community evaluation

Ex Sa NI sc
 10   5  1   9   Unification vs. SAT solver
  7   5  0   7   When are Dynamic and Lexical Scoping equivalent?
 10   7  0  10   Turing complete and computational power
  2   8  1   1   Rigorous proof against pseudorandom generator
  4   6  2   2   Recursive complexity with change of variable
  5   8  0   5   How to go about working the average case run time of this trivial algorithm (and other algorithms)?
  1   6  4 ‒3   Sensor Cover Problem
  8   7  0   8   Difference between regular expressions: $(0^*1^*)^*$ and $(0+1)^*$
  9   7  0   9   Nested Big O-notation
  5  11  0   5   Are $\log_{10}(x)$ and $\log_2(x)$ in the same big-O class of functions?

Totals for the Feb 2013 community evaluation

Ex Sa NI sc
 11   9  0  11   Coloring a Unicyclic Graph
  6  13  1   5   Is this a regular grammar?
 15   8  0  15   What is the advantage of Randomized Quicksort?
  3   8  4 ‒1   k-armed bandit - index policies vs. Q-learning
  7  10  3   4   Proving P = NP without mathematical statements / computer program
  4  12  2   2   Progress of algorithms in problem spaces
 12   5  0  12   Which complexity classes are $\mathsf{RE}$?
 13   8  0  13   Concrete understanding of difference between PP and BPP definitions
  1  10  8 ‒7   Design the transition function
  1   9  7 ‒6   Can Real-Time Strategy games be ever solved?

_{Ex/Sa/NI: number of “excellent/satisfactory/needs improvement” ratings}
^{sc: total score}