How can we encourage asking questions and increase the rate of new questions?

Question

Well, it appears that our visitor stream is gently ticking upward from the early days of the public beta.

I implore everyone to remember that welcoming new users into the community is a critical phase of the development of any Q&A site. Those who are contributing thoughtfully and constructively should, of course, be responded to on the same terms. And perhaps most importantly, remember to upvote their contributions as well! (After all, if you responded to the question, it was useful, right?)

That being said, it concerns me that our question-asking rate is falling fairly quickly.

What are some ways to encourage users to ask great questions here? I am not suggesting posting 'seed' questions, and we still definitely need to be concerned about the scope of allowed topics. However, without a regular influx of new questions, the site will die.

So, what steps can we take to improve our daily question count?

Answer 1

Well, you can start asking questions yourself.

Yeah, self-service is not cool. And stuff. But if you or me don't have anything to ask - then how are we different from people, who lack critical thinking ? How can we say about ourselves, that we are thinking at all ?

I mean, if we just accept, that all the questions of philosophy have been already answered - then we should close this site, write a book (or wiki) - and let people get the Holy Knowledge from there.

Answer 2

Some people are interested in philosophy, but they haven't studied philosophy as much as some people here. People with more experience know which questions have been answered by other philosophers and which questions are age-old.

People that are interested want to know what which questions are unanswered, think about the it, and see if they could solve it or help the issue in some way. Some may disagree with answers and want to challenge it. When they do challenge it and are told they're wrong, they want to know why they are wrong or where their errors are.

It would be useful if there was an easy way to see an overview of philosophy like a big flowchart of everything or argument map or mind map. I want to browse philosophy like software in an open source repository with revision control, check it out, compile it to checks for errors and view stack traces, if it has issues, submit a bug, fork it someone disagrees, but still be able to diff it.