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After three weeks of merriment, we have put the tag away for another year. We hope everybody had fun!

There were some discussions just before and during the season this year about whether and how to make any changes to the policy for the future. We made a small tweak to wording but didn't change anything else this year. While it's fresh in everyone's mind: how did it go? What worked well, and what if anything do you think we might want to adjust for the future?

Here are some statistics from this year:

  • 86 new PTIJ questions remained open during the season. This is similar to last year (84).
  • 5 new PTIJ questions were closed during the season (2 as duplicates).
  • 5 new PTIJ questions were deleted during the season. Per our policy, 3 of the 5 in the previous bullet have also been deleted; we haven't deleted the dupes. This makes a total of 8 deletions. This is much lower than last year (32).
  • 15 questions from prior years were reopened by request.
  • On meta, we had 3 new PTIJ questions and 1 question reopened from a previous year.

Here's the current status of questions from each of the years that we've had Purim Torah (main site, not meta):

  • 2017: 88 closed, 8 more deleted
  • 2016: 84 closed, 32 more deleted
  • 2015: 110 closed, 33 more deleted
  • 2014: 18 closed, 8 more deleted
  • 2013: 33 closed, 2 more deleted
  • 2012: 19 closed, 4 more deleted
  • 2011: 5 closed, 0 deleted

(It would be more work to get the deletion dates; it is possible that some questions from year N were deleted in year N+1 by the Roomba, for example. I obtained these numbers with the on-site search, not SEDE.)

SEDE data should be meaningful after March 19, for anybody who wants to explore it. Once the data there is updated, it might be interesting to look at things like score distributions, numbers of participating users, and probably lots of other stuff.

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  • 2
    One might ask: what happened with that dip in 2014? That's the year we published Purim - Mi Yodeya?. I don't know if that's the reason or just correlation. Mar 15, 2017 at 2:18
  • Who's gonna do the data for average post score and all that other fun stuff? Mar 15, 2017 at 4:18
  • The point of Purim Torah in Jest should be to have fun and give everyone a good time. Having read through many of the comments, it seemed to me like the moderators should calm down more. All the questions were going to be closed shortly anyway...
    – Eliyahu
    Mar 15, 2017 at 5:24
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    @Eliyahu if there were cases where you thought moderators over-reacted to something, I encourage you to elaborate in an answer. The moderators aim to apply community norms, not make stuff up on our own, so if we're missing the mark on that, or if there's been some failure of communication, it'll be helpful to discuss and address it. Thanks! Mar 15, 2017 at 14:36

2 Answers 2

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Can we have a discussion about repeating jokes in different contexts and decide on an official policy for next year?

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    +1 for having the discussion, and then an outcome of that discussion might be policy changes. Mar 19, 2017 at 15:06
  • I still stand by what I said at the end of the chat. Repeat jokes should be closed as dupes.
    – DonielF
    Mar 19, 2017 at 15:44
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    A good way to accomplish this is by asking a question about that here on meta, and ideally posting an answer with a suggestion
    – Double AA Mod
    Mar 20, 2017 at 0:25
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Here are some numbers from SEDE:

PTIJ stats by year

Graph reflecting the numbers shown below

year    N   N_not_upvoted   avg_score
2011    5   1   1.6
2012    19  1   6.1
2013    33  1   4.2
2014    18  0   4.8
2015    110 16  4.7
2016    84  11  4.6
2017    82  15  3.9

Key:
- N: Number of questions
- N_not_upvoted: Number of questions with score <= 0
- avg_score: Average score of all questions

Caveats (to ensure comparable numbers):
- Only takes into account votes cast within a week of a question being posted.
- Only includes questions that either have answers or had a net positive score within a week of being posted.

This chart shows a slight downward trend in PTIJ question quality, as judged by community voting, and an fairly stable number of PTIJ questions that the community, on net, doesn't like, but that get at least one answer.

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  • What's the average score of questions that have positive scores? Mar 20, 2017 at 2:11
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    Some discussion about PTIJ data analysis, for future reference.
    – MTL
    Mar 21, 2017 at 22:52
  • sorry I am am haarets, what. is the meaning of this stats, is there some interesting hypothesis that you search to confirm?
    – kouty
    Mar 22, 2017 at 16:03
  • @kouty I guess the hypothesis to confirm or reject would be something like "The quality of PTIJ posts has been going down over time," with the possible conclusion from that being "We ought to look into ways to increase the quality of PTIJ posts."
    – Isaac Moses Mod
    Mar 22, 2017 at 17:59
  • @Isasc Moses, interesting, btw the essence of purim posts is not entirely clear for me
    – kouty
    Mar 22, 2017 at 19:34
  • I'd be interested to compare that to the trend of non-PTIJ posts. The average score started declining and the number of non-upvoted posts started increasing at the same time the total number of posts spiked. I wonder if that means that there are now just too many posts for people to see them all מה שאין כן in previous years.
    – Daniel
    Mar 30, 2017 at 13:08
  • The reason I'd be interested to compare this trend to non PTIJ-questions is because I have a suspicion that we'd see something similar there due to increased popularity of the site.
    – Daniel
    Mar 30, 2017 at 13:09

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