Community statistics

Question

What characteristic behaviour does our community exhibit? Is it possible to capture this through some statistic or visually through graphs?

Certainly! There is a host of information available through the SEDE. This post is meant to collate some of the discussions contained within How can we explore the content of TeX.SX? as a showcase of the community's behaviour on an annual basis. For those interested in contributing statistics, considering adding an answer to the linked post.

Please provide an answer in the form of a SEDE query and if not, explain in as much detail as possible the type of statistic you'd like to see. Consult the Database schema documentation for the public data dump and SEDE for information on the variables and content. Well-formed constructions will make its way into this post's answer section shortly after New Year.

The idea is to highlight activity of the community and not to isolate individual behaviour (although this may be the case naturally when it comes to "outlier users" - like those with highest reputation, for example). This is not an absolute rule; exclusions may apply.

Examples of good inquiries/statistics:

• What is the total number of badges awarded by class over time?

  This statistic attempts to see whether merit (through posts, say) and participation (through moderation, say) act similarly. Does this change over time?

• Is there a better time to post a question based on community activity?

  Facebook is a good example of this, where posts aired at the time when most of your friends "wake up" (in the morning, hopefully) receives far more attention than those posted when everyone's asleep.

Examples of bad inquiries/statistics:

• When will I receive my next <type> badge? Or, what badges will I receive next?

  This statistic is specific to an individual (again, exclusions may apply...) or doesn't attempt to address community behaviour.

• What time of day do most community members vote?

  Voting is (and always will be) anonymous. One way of protecting this anonymity is by removing time-stamps from votes in the SEDE (keeping only date-stamps). As such, it's not possible to ascertain this effectively.

Answer 1

2011

Summary

The first full year of TeX.SE since going public on Aug 2, 2010, and its subsequent graduation (on Nov 11, 2011).

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Posts (Questions and Answers)

• Posts by day

  

• Average posts by day-of-week

  

• Posts by time-of-day; post activity peaks around 4PM UTC

  

• 50% of questions are answered in under 35 minutes

  

• Major network events related to posts that may influence the site behaviour

  • 2011-03-10: Auto-deletion of low score, zero answers questions has been extended a bit.

  • 2011-04-29: Users are limited to posting 70 50 questions over the last 30 days.

• Queries

  • Questions/answers by date (2011)

  • Questions' answers (time to answer) (2011)

  • Answer count by post (2011)

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Comments

• Number of comments by post type; typically one can expect fewer comments on answers than on questions (218 comments per 100 questions and 186 comments per 100 answers), even though there were almost 50% more comments on answers than questions.

  

• Roughly 27% of all comments in 2011 (15,601 out of 57,234) were made by 10 specific users.

  

  

• Queries

  • Comments (2011)

  • Top comments (2011)

  • Top 10 commenters (2011)

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Badges

• Total gold/silver/bronze badges over time (by month)

  

• Total badges awarded by type

  

• Total gold/silver/bronze badges by class and day-of-week

  

• Top 5 badges: 1 - Student, 2 - Supporter, 3 - Scholar, 4 - Nice Answer, 5 - Editor

  

• Major events related to badges

  • 2011-02-09: Flagging for moderator attention now counts for the Citizen Patrol (gold) badge. This change applies retroactively.

  • 2011-02-22: Outspoken (silver) badge introduced.

  • 2011-02-22: Requirements for achieving the Strunk & White (silver) and Copy Editor (gold) badges have changed. Now it only counts how many revisions are made, not individual title or body changes. Each requires 80 and 500 revisions respectively.

  • 2011-07-07: Synonymizer (bronze) badge added for first approved tag synonym.

  • 2011-08-06: Proofreader (bronze) badge for having reviewed 100 suggested edits.

  • 2011-08-15: Excavator (bronze) and Archaeologist (silver) badges added for editing posts that were inactive for 6 months.

  • 2011-08-22: New gold badge "Marshal" (gold) for achieving a flag-weight of 749.

  • 2011-08-24: New bronze badge "Analytical" (bronze) for visiting every section of the FAQ.

  • 2011-11-07: New bronze badge "Reviewer" (silver) for reviewing 300 posts and acting on over 60 of them.

  • 2011-11-08: The Reviewer badge has been changed to a silver badge with the requirements increased to 1000 reviews and acting on at least 200.

• Queries

  • Badges by date (2011)

_{(1) Disclaimer: The Stack Exchange network's bank of knowledge is a living database with content being editable by the entire community. As such, query results pulled from SEDE may differ from the above. (2) All references to time is based on UTC.}