Why does Judaism.StackExchange have nearly triple as many questions as Islam.StackExchange?

Question

StackExchange is a pretty popular site around the world. If you consider the entire StackExchange network, it is well within the world's top 50 most visited platforms.

However I found it very interesting that this page judaism.stackexchange.com, has so much content, especially when you compare to a much larger religious group's page, like Islam.stackexchange.com.

The current stats are

Islam                         Judaism

questions   12k               questions 34k        
answers     19k               answers   52k
answered    82%               answered  84%
users       27k               users 15k

The proportion of users between islam and judaism (27:15) roughly matches the proporiton of Muslims to Jews in North America (assuming nobody else in the world uses StackExchange)

What then explains the massive difference in the number of questions and answers?

Does it demonstrate that Judaism has more rules and therefore more confusion? Does it demonstrate that Judaism is more open to interpretation? Could it simply be that there's another far more popular forum about Islam but not something similar for Judaism?

I'm interested to hear theories

Answer 1

As a moderator on Islam.SE, I suspect the reason for that is highly cultural. A lot of Muslims who are actively studying the religion — those people who really tend to propel questions on a Stack Exchange site — are strongly disinclined to self-study, or studying outside of strictly regulated channels: You can't learn your religion from just anyone, it's important to learn it from people who are both knowledgeable and firm in belief until you have the skills and experience to differentiate good answers from bad yourself.

We do have a good core of knowledgeable people on Islam.SE, but they're far more likely to answer questions than to ask any.

As a result, Islam.SE still tends to get a lot of basic beginner and peer-support questions, which are typically not interesting to experts and often end up closed and/or roomba'd due to low quality. The sort of expert-level questions that really tend to make a Stack Exchange site thrive have been slow in coming, even after eight years.