How can we be more welcoming to new users?

Question

In light of the recent Stack Overflow post on being more welcoming to newcomers, I believe it is worthwhile for us to explore what we can do to help new visitors ease into the site.

While I do not believe we should relax standards for what is considered an acceptable question, nor should we answer repeat questions "just to be nice."

However, it does seem appropriate that we do a better job explaining why we have issues with questions that are posted in a way that helps users try to improve their question if possible, or be a clear explanation of what's wrong.

Are there any other suggestions for how we can implement this initiative here on Academia.SE?

Answer 1

Something that was pointed out in a recent answer on another question here on meta:

Often a newcomer will ask a question which turns out to be a duplicate. This question will then be marked as such, and often nothing further will happen.

While this is all as it should be, it may leave the newcomer feeling like they did something wrong for not finding the duplicate themselves.

For this reason I propose that when we mark such questions as duplicate, we also make some remark indicating that this is not a fault with the question, and that the existence of this new version will help future visitors to find the answer they need. Hopefully, this will make the newcomer feel more welcome and they will be more inclined to stick around and ask other questions or even answer some.

Answer 2

Adding to Tobias' plea for better explanation of duplicate flags, I suggest we give an explanation more often (whenever we can?) for any close-votes.

Sure, we already have "canned" explanations that come with a close-vote, but since they are necessarily phrased in general terms, the OP may have difficulties to understand what specifically makes their question (for example) opinion-based.

In fact, we should always be able to explain how the general close-reason relates to the specific question. Such a reason-giving requirement would not only "be nice" to new users, it would also help safeguard borderline off-topic questions and make us less "trigger-happy".

I sometimes find myself wanting to close questions for being "too broad" just because I can't think of an informative answer, or for being "unclear" just because I don't quite understand what the issue is. But that doesn't mean that someone with better expertise cannot give a useful answer to a somewhat broad or (to me) opaque question. If others here have similar impulses, it might be a good idea to ask for specificity or clarification, wait if edits are made or useful answers are given, and only then, after a while, decide whether voting to close is actually helpful.

Answer 3

Lighten up on enforcing rules for the sake of enforcing rules. This is a problem all over StackExchange, and academia.SE is no exception.

Comment deletion is a good example. Newcomers may not remember that comments aren't for answers, and may think comments are for short responses. But their (possibly highly upvoted) comment may get deleted for no other reason than too many other comments accumulated below it, so a mod moved ALL the comments to chat. Which is the same as deleting them, for people who have no interest in using chat. A lot of thought goes into some comments, and nothing discourages new users more than semi-arbitrarily deleting the content they contributed. (In fact, I am not a new user, but I still struggle with this. Sometimes, the thing the OP most needs to hear is not a direct answer to their question, so it wouldn't fit as an answer. I have had such comments removed without even getting a notification, and it makes me want to contribute to the site less.) At the very least, there should be an upvote threshold above which comments aren't removed so willy-nilly. (Or maybe they can be automatically converted to answers in some situations?)

We should also not be such sticklers for whether something is on-topic. Blatantly off-topic questions should of course be removed, but there seems to be a culture of "when in doubt, say no" just because people like to be sticklers for rules. It's not hard to see how this discourages newcomers. If we're not sure, why not leave the question up and see if any good answers result.

We need something like "Rule 0" which would roughly state "ignore the rules when following them would make the site less useful." This would not only make the site more welcoming, it would make it better.

(The obvious response would be: if the rules are hindering us, we should make better rules and follow those. But life is not so simple. We know good content when we see it, but we can't always write down a finite set of rules that will reliably sort good content from bad.)

Answer 4

Is it possible to change the minimum reputation to unlock the chat privilege? Or changing it from "privilege" to a "basic right".

If new users had the opportunity to be redirected to the chat they would feel more welcome, having the opportunity to discuss opinion-based questions or being helped by others when facing some confusion/misunderstanding.

Recent example: Should I do BSc in mathematical physics or theoretical physics?

Answer 5

As a relatively new person here, I think the response about duplicates up above is a good one. Just to add to that, I feel like there are times where a question has maybe one answer, and it's not at all comprehensive or directly relevant to the new question being asked, but close enough where some would automatically close it.

I know this is basically asking for more lax standards in closing a duplicate, but I really do feel like there are sometimes pretty unsatisfactorily answered questions from a few years ago and it would be nice to seek a fresh and more relevant (and hopefully comprehensive) response.

Last point (and unrelated to the first)... I was directed to SE by a few colleagues, and they warned that it's mostly for STEM/comp people, and if you're humanities, social science, etc. you won't get much out of it. I guess I don't have an explicit suggestion here, but that feeling has certainly rung true for me so far.

Edited to add: I don't intend this at all to be snarky, but one relatively simple fix would be to figure out how to incentivize more people to answer more questions. I was searching through the first few pages of recent questions just a moment ago, and most questions had 0, 1, or 2 answers. If someone asks a question for the first time and gets 1 answer, they may not think it worth it to return and engage further.

Answer 6

I think users should have some better way of selecting tags or some tags should automatically be assigned to a question rather than the user having to explicitly search for a tag that may not necessarily exist.

Also, off-topic questions by new users should be automatically migrated to the suitable SE site rather than closing the question or deleting it which may leave a bad impression on the new user.

Downvotes for answers and questions should be attached with a 'reason' for the downvote so that the user knows what went wrong , this might also help avoid random downvoting.

And i personally think , questions from low reputation users who are fairly new should be put on hold for 10 minutes at a checkpoint once the user submits the question so that the moderators and bots have a chance to filter out very far off or inappropriate questions rather than having to clean up later , also to make up for the 10 minutes , new users can be allowed to post every 30 mins and all the questions that the moderators didn't get a chance to check will get posted automatically after the said 10 minutes.

Answer 7

Please don't overcomplicate yourself. We just need to answer their questions, and they will feel welcome. What about this? We force our lovely moderators to answer each and every newcomer question, no matter what they ask. The new users will see exactly 5 answers from our moderators, they will feel very happy.

I think it will work as our moderators spend most of their awake time on this site anyway.