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We all love Tridion Stack Exchange, but there is a whole world of people out there who need answers to their questions and don't even know that this site exists. When they arrive from Google, what will their first impression be? Let's try to look at this site through the eyes of someone who's never seen it before, and see how we stack up against the rest of the 'Net.

The Site Self-Evaluation review queue is open and populated with 10 questions that were asked and answered in the last quarter. Run a few Google searches to see how easy they are to find and compare the answers we have with the information available on other sites.

Rating the questions is only a part of the puzzle, though. Do you see a pattern of questions that should have been closed but are not? Questions or answers that could use an edit? Anything that's going really well? Post an answer below to share your thoughts and discuss these questions and the site's health with your fellow users!

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One striking thing I see coming back in all questions and answers is that we could do a lot better on our edits to improve readability, things like:

  • Component and Page with a capital letter, when referring to the SDL Tridion item

  • SDL Tridion (and not tridion or SDL tridion)

  • Code block indentation

  • usage of ticks (`) to highlight classes and such in a sentence

  • adding <!-- language: «lang-or-tag-here» --> in front of code block with the correct language (see this and this) to improve syntax highlighting of the code sample (we have a default language set for some of our tags, but I notice that most of the time it works better if you manually specify the language, a question/answer can contain both XML and C# code so a default is hard to specify)

And most important:

  • correct spelling and English grammar

I know that some might find (especially the first two) these points irrelevant, but I find it generally improves the readability of a question and an answer, and that will make our site better accessible and more usable for everybody.

Also note that a large group of our community does not have English as a native language and maybe even have a bad command of it. So the questions they ask (or answers they give) might contain spelling and grammar mistakes (which is both understandable and acceptable!). It is up to us (the community) to improve on that through edits (that's what we have the mechanism for). Please never see an edit that anybody makes to your question or answer as an insult to you or an insult to your command of English. By fixing spelling and grammar mistakes we improve the site in general which will make us more visible.

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    Does anyone outside SDL actually call it SDL Tridion? The next time someone at my company refers to our CMS that way will be the first time... I've only made it through 1/2 the review questions but for the most part I agree with your observations. Aug 14, 2013 at 7:53
  • I guess indeed a large part of our community knows the product as Tridion (see the name of this site ;o), but the official name of it is SDL Tridion Aug 14, 2013 at 7:58
  • I agree with most of this. I think you're doing a good job of sorting it out in a lot of cases. It would be good to be in the situation of the community doing more of it as well rather than leaving it completely up to the mods. Aug 16, 2013 at 13:51
  • Yes looking at the top three editors, all being mods... we definitely have to get the rest of the community more involved ;) Aug 16, 2013 at 14:06
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