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I know this can't be a question on its own as it doesn't ask about Judaism, but anyway: It interests me a lot to know the stats of this site:

  1. How many questions are asked on different topics?
  2. How many of them are answered and/or commented?
  3. How many of them are accepted answers?
  4. How many users contribute to what portion of all discussions
    (like the 80/20 principle)
  5. Can the users be distributed by their ethnical/community affiliation, learning experience, country, sex, age etc?
  6. Question distribution by Halahic topics of Shu"A (Ora"H, Yo"D, Cho"M, Eva"E)?
  7. Rabbis and books cited?

Maybe some other interesting stuff.
Please?

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    Are you aware of SEDE for examining these kinds of data? This is related to a couple other stats questions - e.g. - but something tells me external data like that described in #5 will not be attainable this way, since reliably making such inferences from Q&A content probably requires much larger data sets, if it's possible (I'm guessing). 1-4 should be fairly straightforward as long as tags can be a proxy for topics.
    – WAF
    Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 11:18
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    One way to address 5-7 would be through a carefully-designed sampling and analysis study. Design criteria for a post population to sample from. Write a query that gets a random sample of posts from that population. Design qualitative text-analysis rules to be applied by expert readers for categorizing the posts along tradition, expertise, source, etc. axes. Extract a random sample, and have expert readers apply the analysis rules to all posts in the sample, then collect statistics from their analysis.
    – Isaac Moses Mod
    Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 14:27

1 Answer 1

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How many questions are asked on different topics?

You can look at the tag overview page to see how many questions are tagged with which tag. That should give you a rough idea under the assumption that questions are tagged correctly. Obviously not every question will always have the right tag and it depends on whether the granularity is enough for you.

How many of them are answered and/or commented?

If you go to the questions overview page you can see that as of writing this Mi Yodeya has 25,829 questions. By clicking on the Unanswered tab you can see how many of these have not received an answer. You can look at those that have received an answer, but none of the answers have a positive vote count and those without any answers. Right now there are 3,246 questions without any answer. This translates to roughly 12.6% of questions being completely unanswered.

How many of them are accepted answers?

You can use the search bar with the advanced search (a link on the right side gives you more options) hasaccepted:yes to find all questions with an accepted answer. Right now there are 8,851 questions with an accepted answer, which is roughly 34% of all questions on the site.

How many users contribute to what portion of all discussions

This number is more difficult to find and depends on what you mean with "discussion". For example here on Meta there is the tag. Or do you mean answers? Posts in total, which would include questions? Do you include comments?

You can use the StackExchange Data Explorer to get some numbers if you know what you are searching for. For example the query:

SELECT Count(*)
  FROM Posts
 WHERE OwnerUserId = '28789'
   AND PostTypeId = 2; 

would give you an overview over all answers I have created on the site you are searching for. You can find your ID by going to your profile. Mine for example reads https://worldbuilding.meta.stackexchange.com/users/28789/secespitus and my Id is 28789. Just choose the ID of someone you are interested in and plug it into the query to get the amount of answers they have written.

Of course this little bit of information is also available from their profile page, so you would have to write a far more extensive query. But this may get you started with your search.

Can the users be distributed by their ethnical/community affiliation, learning experience, country, sex, age etc?

No, such information is not available. You could look at the profile and see whether someone has written something like that, but in general such information is not available and it's up to anyones guess.

Question distribution by Halahic topics of Shu"A (Ora"H, Yo"D, Cho"M, Eva"E)?

I am just passing through and randomly found this question, so I don't understand this point. Sorry.

Rabbis and books cited?

With the SEDE you can analyze all answers on the site for certain keywords for example. Maybe that helps you to get those numbers?

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    For someone who's just passing by this is a pretty impressive answer :-> The question before last just relates to specific question topics, the abbreviations are specifics books of Jewish law (imagine like volumes of the US federal law)
    – mbloch
    Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 12:08
  • @mbloch Thanks! I know my way around SE, which made it pretty easy to find numbers for the first few questions, even if I have never participated on the site. If these abbreviations are about certain topics the approach with the tags might be useful. But here we are running into the problem of me not knowing the tagging policies of this Stack again :D Sorry, I don't know how you guys tag your questions or for example if there is a certain pattern to citing rabbis and books that is normally used around here. If you can point me to some examples I could try to come up with some queries.
    – Secespitus
    Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 12:18
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    Your answer was already very helpful like this - the OP will know which of these topics is tagged specifically (some is)
    – mbloch
    Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 12:20
  • Thank you, it helps a bit. @mbloch I intended to address the issue of content, not just the statistics. I would like to see how the contemporary Judaism is reflected on this site, e.g. Ashkenzi vs Sefardim, Israeli Rabbis and OPs vs American, questions of Musar vs strict Halacha, simple (yes/no, who siad...) vs Pilpul etc. It fascinates me to know how (naturally) biased the site is, for example, novice vs serious scholars etc.
    – Al Berko
    Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 12:35
  • @AlBerko I understand - as you saw there is a tool to build/execute queries on the question/answer data. However, as you know, users are officially anonymous so it is hard to do demographical analysis
    – mbloch
    Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 13:11
  • @AlBerko Those look like topics that are already categorized on the site through different tags. For example there is ashkenazi and sephardi-mizrachi-eastern, which seems to give you an idea about the first of your examples. Also remember that tags are only created when a question about the topic is asked, so if you can't find anything that tells you a lot about how much demand for this sort of question currently exists on this site. Novice versus experts is a difficult topic on many sites and hard to rate as nobody is forced to actually prove who they are.
    – Secespitus
    Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 13:11
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    Tags, our main way of formally categorizing content, only apply to questions, not answers, so they won't help with determining the relative prevalence of answers from various traditional perspectives, citing various sources, or coming from various levels of expertise. We could probably figure out proxies for some of these with some carefully-designed text searches, but that sort of thing is confounded by the fact that a single source can be referred to by various different names, transliterated spellings, and abbreviations.
    – Isaac Moses Mod
    Commented Jul 10, 2018 at 14:23

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