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When will this ELL site be graduated? I mean, are they still deciding if they should continue it or close it? It would be great to see ELL in a new original design.

I mean, maybe 4 billions of people in the world want to speak English. This site for them is indispensable.

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  • I have no idea. But it doesn't look to me like ELL will be closed--a lot of sites have stayed in beta much longer, and quite a few sites with weaker stats haven't been shut down. So my guess is, ELL is on track to graduate. I just have no idea when.
    – user230
    Oct 2, 2013 at 4:42
  • See also: When will my site graduate?
    – user230
    Oct 2, 2013 at 4:45
  • @snailboat, It would not be bad to see some updates from the TPTB.
    – Mistu4u
    Oct 2, 2013 at 4:59
  • The only somewhat problematic metric is number of questions daily. It's still "okay" but not excellent. I don't think these questions ever need more answers than they are getting (most of them are fairly simple so 1 correct answer is perfectly sufficient.) I believe though once the site graduates number of questions per day should increase.
    – SF.
    Oct 2, 2013 at 8:40
  • @SF. ` believe though once the site graduates number of questions per day should increase`- This is the part I can't really understand. It's not like people are not getting this site from the search engines, so how can a mere graduation (which is a verbose IMHO) can change questions/day (read visits/day)?
    – Mistu4u
    Oct 2, 2013 at 16:51
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    @Mistu4u: I don't know about others but I discovered most of SE sites from the link panel at the bottom of StackOverflow page. Only much later have I learned about Area51 and beta sites, and even then I was extremely wary of them.
    – SF.
    Oct 3, 2013 at 9:32
  • Currently we're at 27.8 questions/day and most metrics exceeding requirements by far. Is really the 1.8 answer/question holding the site back from graduating?
    – SF.
    Aug 6, 2014 at 23:37

1 Answer 1

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I'd like to see more questions that get more than one answer. Oftentimes, one answer seems to tell the whole story, and nobody else weighs in.

Of course, sometimes that's just due to the nature of the question. If an O.P. asks, "Should I use X or Y here?", the answer might just be a simple, "You should use X, because..." with not much else to say. Similarly, a "What does this phrase mean?" question can often be satisfactorily answered with a single short answer. But I think ELL might look more like a ready-to-graduate site if we had more questions that could be examined more thoughtfully, to the point where such questions sparked two or three very thoughtful answers. I think those questions would tend to be more interesting to the English learner in general, and therefore more likely to attract more of those 4 billion people you mention who are wanting to improve their English.

In the meantime, patience and diligence are key. If we keep striving to write high-quality questions and answers, I believe the graduation day will come.

I haven't been privy to any conversations about this matter, so I'm only expressing a hunch, but I think the SE folks are probably not in a hurry to graduate any site; they don't want graduate a site that begins with an initial burst of excitement but eventually fizzles out. Better to graduate a healthy site late than to graduate an unviable site too early.

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  • The last line is very true and real; +1 only for that.
    – Mistu4u
    Oct 2, 2013 at 16:54
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    Your last paragraph especially is spot on. I just want to add that we do regularly monitor every beta site. We review the periodic site evaluations that are conducted via /review and monitor other stats like traffic patterns, user engagement, and overall main & meta participation.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Oct 3, 2013 at 17:06

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