CoGro Musings - 2015-03-25

« first day (5 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (3131 days later) »

Shog9

00:56

Knowing what to say is easy, or becomes easy with experience. Finding the right way to say it is a battle that I must fight each day anew.

5 hours later…

Shog9

06:06

611 questions closed as duplicates in response to asker confirmations thus far; small but noticeable spike in asker edits:

All sites:

Asker-triggered, Community-closed duplicates Site Name
-------------------------------------------- ---------
612                                          Stack Overflow
13                                           Super User
8                                            Server Fault
0                                            Stack Apps
0                                            Cooking
0                                            Home Improvement
1                                            Game Developers

jmac

06:53

TOEIC reading scores by Language (simple average, not weighted by population for each country or number of test takers):

When we are looking at how to prioritize international sites, and which languages we should tackle, it becomes obvious that there is no perfect data set out there to help us make that decision. For instance, if we just go by number of native speakers then we should prioritize Hindi over Japanese.

But is that the best metric to go by? Probably not. If people who speak Hindi are more likely to speak English, then that affects priority. And even moreso, if people who program whose native language is Hindi are more likely to speak English, then that affects our priorities more.

So do we prioritize German over Korean, for instance? Well the TOEIC scores would seem to say that Germans are better at English reading than the Koreans, but population-wise there are more German-speakers. Right now I'm just trying to gather what data I can so that we can in the hopes that it helps inform our decision-making.

(and in reality, some languages come with all sorts of other issues. There have been dozens of Japanese-specific bugs because Japanese uses funny characters and doesn't believe in spaces. Arabic would face similar issues due to being a right-to-left language. We also have to find the right people to tackle these sites)

4 hours later…

Tim Post

10:54

The 'sweet spot' in deciding how we're going to proceed is ordering by languages with the most amount of developers, having the lowest English proficiency. Let's call this the Motivational factor, as that's what motivates us to want to explore these sites. On the second hand, you have business strategy and goals, which happen to coincide with whatever the first hand decides.

5 hours later…