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I have been on Writers.SE for a few days now and I'm completely sold. I love the content, I love the community and I love the potential of the site. So my question:

If I wanted to start from the beginning and read all of the content here, making some edits and adding some answers along the way, what are some guidelines you might suggest?

I don't want to be a super-troll bumping lots of old content and I don't want to seem disrespectful to all the awesome users and mods who have created what's already in existence here. I do, however, currently have a lot of time on my hands and would like to help improve and curate this site to the end that we might get out of beta ASAP!

One specific way that answers could be phrased: Assuming I have a significant amount of time each day to dedicate to growing Writers.SE, out of 100%, how much of that time would you spend on:

  • Developing Questions
  • Developing Answers
  • Editing Content
  • SEO and link publicizing
  • Other (be specific please)

Lastly, is there such a thing as too much? I don't want to be rude or seem ignorant or in any way insult anyone here, but as I said, I currently have a lot of time to spare. I know that really great sites and communities take a long time to build, but I'd just like to do as much as I can with the resources and experience that I have.

With that spirit in mind, I hope that we can work together to make an answer that will help me and all the other exuberant writers who are going to be coming to Writers.SE soon! Thank you, and I can't wait to work with all of you.

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TL;DR - it's all useful, but in rank order I'd suggest: 1. Questions 2. Link publicizing 3. Answers 4. Editing

If you look at our Area51 statistics, the main thing listed as "Needs Work" is the number of questions per day. We have great answers, active users, and a steadily increasing number of people visiting the site. Now what we need is questions for them to answer. So I'd say the number one priority should be questions. Check out this meta question for a list of good existing questions. Can you come up with more that demonstrate the same positive qualities? Please do so! Do so regularly - daily. Make them good. Make them thought-provoking. Make them web search engine friendly, twitter friendly, facebook friendly, etc.

Next I'd say that link publicizing is going to be very helpful. Getting more eyes on our site is always good, because hopefully it will encourage more people to ask questions. We actually bring in a good chunk of search traffic - our percentage of traffic coming from search engines is approaching the goal. Direct links would be extremely helpful.

Then I'd focus on answers. Our questions usually get good ones, but there are topics like esoteric citation formats that take a while to get answered. If you see one of those, research it and answer it!

Then I'd focus on cleaning up content. If you want people to be impressed by the site, we need to make sure the lower quality questions and answers that are salvageable are salvaged and those that aren't are closed and deleted as needed. Edit (everyone can!) and flag or vote to close where appropriate.

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    +1. I come here every day and it only takes me a few minutes to review the new questions. If there were more questions there'd be a higher chance that I -- and others -- would spend more time here answering them.
    – Monica Cellio
    Jan 27, 2012 at 15:37

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