For over a year (close to two years actually) this site has been growing, and quite a few members are taking an active part in both asking and answering the questions. As all of you (I'm sure) are aware, the Signal Processing Stack Exchange site is still in its Beta stage. If you're excited about the community and the effort everyone's been putting into keeping it active, helpful and relevant, perhaps we can all try and do a little more to help the site graduate.

As the first order of business, I'd like to point out that there are three categories in which we're doing Okay, but not Excellent. One of them is essentially amount of active Q&A traffic on the site, but that's not something we should be greatly concerned about since we are steadily growing, and are sure to achieve the critical mass one day. Two other things have to do with answering questions.

Currently, only 86% of all asked questions have been answered, and we need over 90% to get to the Excellent status, which isn't very far off at all. I therefore present everyone with the challenge of getting us all the way up there (and beyond). As an interesting data point, we actually were at 91% only several months ago, the the average number of questions per day increased over these months, while the number of answers has stayed approximately flat. Let's help change this statistic.

What you can do:

  1. Obviously, keep being awesome and post your answers to new questions. I've seen some really great responses out there. Keep it up!
  2. Since we've started falling behind a bit, it would be very helpful to go back and revisit some of the unanswered questions. There are plenty out there that are well formed, but perhaps would take a little more time to answer. Others can have perfectly good shorted answers. There are all kinds of good unanswered questions out there, so please look through them and see where you can contribute.
  3. If you see a question which would benefit from more clarity, please comment and ask for more information. There are surprisingly many users on our site that don't have any experience with other Stack Exchange web sites, so we need to guide them an little at first in the art of forming good questions. This may help you or others to form good and meaningful answers.
  4. Attract more users to the site. I love bragging about this community, and I've gotten quite a few people excited about it online and in person. Some of them are now regular contributors. Spread the word, and help us attract more active membres.

I'm proposing a two-week challenge to get our answered questions rate back to above 90%! For those of you who are already active in answering questions, keep up the great work and please try to find some previously unanswered questions that you can tackle. For those of you who are more passive observers of this site, why not try and contribute some of your own brainpower to the world of signal processing Q&A?

Finally, if you find an unanswered question which you can't address yourself, but that you think can be answered well by other members of the community, post it here in the response wiki to get other members' attention.

Thanks for making Signal Processing Stack Exchange a great community, and let's get serious about graduating to a full Stack Exchange web site. I'm confident that we can do it, and start getting us there!


A list of unanswered questions that you think are easy to provide good answers to (please edit it):

A list of bad questions that are hardly answerable and should really be closed as ambiguous, please populate this list with further suggestions so that people could vote on whether to close them:

  • $\begingroup$ I wouldn't touch the first question with a ten-foot pole; its author has been banned from stackexchange till 2026 or so, right? The second is a bad question as the comments discuss, as is the third (as a homework problem). The fourth question seems to verge on the off-topic since it seems more about MATLAB than about signal processing. $\endgroup$ – Dilip Sarwate Mar 9 '13 at 21:54
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    $\begingroup$ @DilipSarwate Good point about the second one, I moved it. However I think that the one asked by Zaubertank is a good valid question, and it's in the spirit of Stack Exchange community to answer good questions for further community benefit. Answering it clearly won't help the OP, but people searching for Z-transform help may find it very useful. $\endgroup$ – Phonon Mar 10 '13 at 0:56

I've seen a few questions that are answered in the comments, so that activity ceases on those questions even though they aren't officially 'answered'. What's the story with situations like that?

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    $\begingroup$ I think what usually happens is that someone will come in and give a very brief answer in a comment, but the answerer isn't confident that it is thorough enough to suffice as a complete answer. However, the presence of the comment might prevent someone else from coming in and writing a more complete response. $\endgroup$ – Jason R Mar 22 '13 at 23:08

Is there any recourse for questions like this one? It's a very poor question that has been likely abandoned by the OP. However, due to the small amount of traffic on the site and limited number of users with substantial reputation, it's unlikely to garner enough votes for closure. Therefore, it languishes forever as an unanswered question that isn't likely to help anyone.


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