Monday, June 18, 2007

What's the right number of topics?

wis.dmers seem to fall into one of a three camps when it comes to question topics. The first group is busy asking questions with no topics at all. That's okay, but not ideal. Why? Well, topics are a great way to make sure that other people with similar interests will see your question. No topics, and your question will have a lower chance of getting noticed. The second group on wis.dm is doing a great job of adding topics to questions. Not much to say here except keep up the good work of adding relevant, concise topics to your questions. The third group of wisdmers has been a bit verbose on the topic choices. No, 50 topics is not helpful. Too many topics on a question is worse than no topics. And topics that have nothing to do with the question waste everyone's time. Some people might even call it spam.

Today, we've limited the number of topics you can add to a question to 10. This is designed to prevent people from adding large numbers of irrelevant topics. We will be rolling out other changes in the upcoming weeks to make topics even more useful. In the meantime, don't forget to flag off-topic questions you come across. Flagging is your chance to influence the ways you want to see wis.dm used.