I like many of the articles, but I find some are much too short to provide any real useful information.

We actually wanted to encourage the idea that articles don't have to meet any particular minimum length. In some cases you're right that an article could have used more explanation, but in some cases a brief explanation of something very specific might be all you actually need. I think, rather than a minimum length for all articles we need to encourage articles that have the correct length for their focus and topic; it's ok for an explanation or helpful code-snippet on a specific technique to be short, but ideally a broader article shouldn't feel like there's more content missing.

And not often, but sometimes the titles don't match the content

This is probably something we can address if you raise specific examples for us.

Just spit-balling here, but what if we had a customised "report problems" feature for articles that allowed you to select from a list of options, and perhaps could be dealt with by cross-bones (or some other vetted group) of members rather than just moderators. Users could then mark an article as containing typos, having a misleading title, or whatever, and the next available user with appropriate permissions who checks the list of reports could review the report and potentially either make changes directly (only if the users are definitely well vetted), mark the report for staff attention, or perhaps even have a simple way of forwarding the feedback to the author to make changes.

Somebody please help me understand: What is an article? Did the O.P. mean thread? There are tons of new threads every day. I don't understand really the purpose of the question.

Clinton

Somebody please help me understand: What is an article? Did the O.P. mean thread? There are tons of new threads every day. I don't understand really the purpose of the question.

Clinton

look at the home page.

slicer4ever ,

Okay, thanks for that, but what is the difference between a tutorial and an "article"? They look like the same type of thread to me.

Clinton

They aren't a thread at all in the typically sense of referring to a forum discussion -- although they do allow the posting of comments. An article is... well, the normal English definition. Some of them tutorials, some are interviews, some are commentary, etc.

I love it :)
Some are realy great!

First, some of this discussion like article length and what an article is I discuss in more detail in my recent staff journal post.

The peer review process seems to work well enough at preventing spam and truly incorrect articles, but it's not really peer review in the sense of confirming accuracy of the information presented. And it's not clear that we have a broad enough range of specialists on hand to perform real peer review.

Now that we are a few months into the use of the new system we can begin to assess things like the effectiveness of the peer review system. Given the number of articles that are still listed as Under Review I think we definitely have some work cut out for us to improve things moving forward. But again, we had to wait a while to gather some information.

Also, how would people feel about pagination so it's not a wall of text? I have mixed feelings on it; a part of me hates clicking, but a part of me loves the focus pagination brings.

We used to paginate all the time back in the day, but people who didn't like the pages could always click on the printer-friendly version of the article and get it all in one shot. If you try to do this on the current site (there's a printer icon with the social buttons on the bottom-left of an article) you end up with absolutely no page formatting. Then too, there were actually some bugs with the pagination of articles that prevented us from using the feature and all the articles imported from the old site were from the non-paginated versions so overall I just decided to leave out pages. I also don't like how they can be over-used as a way to increase page view numbers, and while a reader might skim a full article, most will generally stop at page 1 if it hasn't captured their attention by then.

Given the number of articles that are still listed as Under Review...

Do we have any idea roughly how many of those are duplicates, junk or spam?

I see 8 copies of "3D Solar System with C#" on the first page alone...

Edit: just realised I am looking at drafts, not the review queue. d'oh.