I'm even newer than you are, but I've noticed much of the same thing. There seems to be a sort of withdrawn sadness about the whole site... Which is terrible, because Perl people are genereally very amiable and gregarious (or at least gregarious ;)

I would venture to say that people aren't excited by the content of the site anymore. As jeffa observed on CB earlier today, there are tons of the same old questions coming in ... "I'm having trouble doing X with Perl, can you help?" ... And a handful of people preaching to the choir about things like Testing and Code Review Standards. I think the latter are actually quite excellent posts, which required time and care and thought, but the responses were lukewarm at best. And I think it's because people are new and don't know what they are supposed to make of it, or they're old and have heard it all before...

It seems as though the site lacks a raison d'être. Is PM a help desk? Or is it just a gathering place, like an IRC channel on steroids? Or is it just a historical artifact from an earlier time on the internet? I think the problem for the "old guard" is the "seen it all before" syndrome, they're tired from fighting the same battles over and over again. I can only imagine that it gets old telling people how to dereference a hash before passing it to each by the 100th or 500th time. On the other hand, the new people (like us) are looking for direction, but there isn't a lot to be found. How can we help? Can we help? Should we even bother?

So, to me, while improving the site is a great idea in itself, it's also something that can address the other issue: how do we get people excited about PerlMonks? How do we make people feel as though they're involved? What's happening here that people want to get involved in, things that are interesting, fun, challenging, things that build a sense of community? Wikipedia has ongoing projects to solicit and improve content, maybe we need something along those lines here. Maybe we need some kind of contests or games... I don't know. I don't want to put myself too far out there with suggestions, because as I said before, I'm new here, and I'm a little lost. :)

In reply to Re: Process for Site Improvement by bellaire
in thread Process for Site Improvement by ELISHEVA

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