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Wordpress Answer has quite a low view count, and less users than other stackexchange sites. Like Gadgets there is a possibility it will be shut down because of this.

However, it would be easy to merge other CMS systems to this site and create with this the necessary critical mass for any of those topics to have a healthy community.

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Absolutely not.

Most of WordPress stuff revolves around APIs and abstraction layers, very specific to WordPress itself.

Mixing several/all CMS together will just create a heap of people who have no clue how to answer each other's questions.

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  • I agree; I would not see any difference between SE site about all the CMSes/blog software and Stack Overflow, apart not having questions about C++, maybe.
    – avpaderno
    Commented May 1, 2011 at 1:12
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I don’t understand the haste. It will take some weeks to get to the critical point where we attract enough people. Why should we make such a decision now?

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Not No, But Hell No!

I worked with Drupal for 2 years and then switched to WordPress. I have no interest in seeing anything related to Drupal anymore. If this were to be merge with Drupal I would loose and invest my energies elsewhere.

Personally I want to see many more niche StackExchange sites, not fewer. Every topic has it's own culture, why try to kill that?

UPDATE:

I just went and read the StackExchange blog posts on the topic and find Joel & Jeff's desire to create fewer large sites very troubling.

For the record, if WordPress Answers gets merged I'd have no interest in continuing my participation (unless they merge ALL SE sites and then add features that make it possible to appear to be smaller sites. I don't want to deal with all the noise of the other topics.)

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  • On the main Stack Overflow site, I usually just browse unanswered questions in the [wordpress] tag, and have an RSS feed for the [propel] tag. But I really like the fact that there is overlap: if I ask a question about database issues in WordPress, it is very well possible that someone who likes MySQL but not WordPress could also answer it. This increases the chance that I get an answer. To achieve the same effect if there was both a MySQL and a WordPress site, I would have to duplicate the question on both sites.
    – Jan Fabry
    Commented Sep 29, 2010 at 7:41
  • @Jan Fabry - In my experience it also increases the chance that you'll get an inappropriate answer. I saw many WordPress questions on SO where the person answering showed how to write a SQL query when the preferred way among WordPress developers is to use the query API. On SO you've got people jumping on questions they are not qualified to answer. And since the person asking doesn't know any better they mark the bad answer as correct. That's one of many reasons why I prefer smaller more focused sites like WordPress Answers.
    – MikeSchinkel Mod
    Commented Sep 29, 2010 at 9:03
  • @Jan Fabry - What SE probably needs to do is merge ALL sites into one and at the same time improve their architecture so that it can still feel like we have separate sights. The community could choose to promote a tag to be a category/site at a subdomain of SE and that subdomain filters for questions and users by those tagged with the site's category. It wouldn't be trivial but I don't see how they are ever going to solve this problem of two little, too big unless they merge them all together or unless they quit pushing the idea that all site must be large.
    – MikeSchinkel Mod
    Commented Sep 29, 2010 at 9:08
  • @Jan Fabry: See: shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html "The downside of going for size and scale above all else is that the dense, interconnected pattern that drives group conversation and collaboration isn't supportable at any large scale. Less is different -- small groups of people can engage in kinds of interaction that large groups can't. ... Larger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can't be supported when you're talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group"
    – MikeSchinkel Mod
    Commented Sep 29, 2010 at 9:09
  • @Jan Fabry: One of the problems is the SO architecture simply doesn't support scale well for questions or for people. For the latter Joel & Jeff seem to want to deny the community aspect by trying to limit conversations (even though they build reputation systems.) The problem with the current SO architecture is that both questions and users get lost in a sea of too many unrelated questions and too many unrelated users. I can't easily see on SO who are the experts for a given tag and I can't close off and create a sandbox if I want to. The tag system just isn't sufficient.
    – MikeSchinkel Mod
    Commented Sep 29, 2010 at 9:22
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Absolutely not

WordPress Answers does not fit the criteria for merging according to Joel's blog post

Here’s the best we could come up with for deciding whether site X should be subsumed by site Y:

Almost all X questions are on-topic for site Y

None of our questions would be on topic for Drupal or another CMS.

If Y already exists, it already has a tag for X, and nobody is complaining.

There are not tags for Drupal or another CMS.

You’re not creating such a big group that you don’t have enough experts to answer all possible questions

We have enough experts to answer almost all questions and this will continue to grow.

There’s a high probability that users of site Y would enjoy seeing the occasional question about X.

I can't speak for everyone but I have no interest in seeing questions about Drupal

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  • in fairness the guy is asking not for any one site to be subsumed by another but for the creation of a new generalised category. Just like stackoverflow has questions spanning multiple languages, it's not inconceivable this could happen at some point in the future for CMS
    – citronic
    Commented Sep 27, 2010 at 11:52
  • Well said, chris
    – Arlen Beiler
    Commented Sep 28, 2010 at 14:00
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Jeff wrote an interesting article about this on the Stack Overflow blog, comparing it to the main Stack Overflow site where you have [java], [c#], [php] all living together, separated by tags and not by sites. If you would have asked people about this beforehand, they would most likely favor different sites per language. However, the "mixed bag" approach seems to work there, so why not here?

I also do think that we should increase promotion of the site, and I do not necessarily agree with those who say everything is OK, and "we'll see in a few weeks". We are already half way through the beta period, and I think we need to work on increasing the number of questions asked and answered per day. Merging with related proposals could increase the overall weight of the site, and give us more chance of survival and growing beyond that.

Update: With the Popularity Contest app, I created a graph with the number of questions in the last 30 days. WordPress answers is the fat brown line. (The current on-line version of the graph does not have the fat line and some data errors.) Of course, this only shows questions, not answers - and we still score low when compared on daily traffic.

Graph with questions over time for Stack Exchange sites

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  • ...Although it could also be detrimental. If this is going to be an official support forum, it had better be focused, in my opinion.
    – Arlen Beiler
    Commented Sep 28, 2010 at 14:01
  • @Arlen: Indeed, if this would be an official site, recognized by WordPress.org, it should stay focused. But do you still think this will happen?
    – Jan Fabry
    Commented Sep 28, 2010 at 15:22
  • @Jan Fabry: That mixed bag is exactly why I spent very little time on StackOverflow. If there were separate SE sites for jQuery, MySQL, Apache and PHP I'd spent time on each of them but as a merged site I have absolutely no interest in answering questions there; I only use it SO when I google and find an answer. JMTCW.
    – MikeSchinkel Mod
    Commented Sep 28, 2010 at 23:04
  • @Jan Fabry: Are you saying there is some change that they will close this site because there's "not enough traffic?"
    – MikeSchinkel Mod
    Commented Sep 28, 2010 at 23:06
  • @Mike: Not enough traffic could be a reason, but not getting high-quality answers to advanced questions could be more important. I sometimes feel that I have to time my question so that it's visible when the top ten contributers are awake, otherwise I've missed my chance. A good thing that sorich87, Rarst and hakre appear to be in similar timezones, otherwise nobody would see them (or are my questions too bad or too difficult?). If the quality of the site depends on ten contributers, that doesn't feel enough to me.
    – Jan Fabry
    Commented Sep 29, 2010 at 7:50
  • @Jan Fabry - The site's been up 2 months; SO has been up 3 years (I think.) Give it some time. (Can you give me an example of questions where you feel you could have gotten better answers but haven't?)
    – MikeSchinkel Mod
    Commented Sep 29, 2010 at 9:00
  • @Jan Fabry for the record your questions are quite challenging, or at least fall into areas I rarely intersect with. :) On lack of answers to hard questions overall - if you look at non-generic unanswered tags it is topped by custom-post-types (which is wicked half-baked stuff it will take couple WP versions to beat in shape) and plugin-recommendation (often primitive boring questions plus power users in WP often have cold attitude towards plugins).
    – Rarst
    Commented Sep 29, 2010 at 17:11

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