Meta meta: Is it working?

Question

I get a feeling that this meta is where issues come to if not die, at least rest comfortably. We can take two issues as examples: a markup language for music, and the scope changes. Both has been around for a while, but nothing has happened. It would be fine if suggestions were either implemented or shut down, but now they are open, seemingly due to indifference.

Post with links to other posts about music markup: Will a music markup language be added to Music SE? If not, then what is the preferred way of entering standard notation?

Let's Talk about the Scope

Another interesting statistic is the overview of the voters on meta. Shows that the activity is not overwhelming...

Maybe everything is good, and I agree that there is not an obvious consensus in these matters which is just waiting to be implemented. But what I see as a tendency to just let issues rot is not making me want to participate more in the site.

Answer 1

All good points @MeaningfulUsername. I don't have a lot of experience of other SE sites, so I don't know how easy it is to get changes made on them. The little experience I do have of Meta-SO and Meta-SE, suggest that there is more action on these meta sites though. It seems as though suggestions become discussions and then changes, much more readily.

As I see it, there are two main ways we could get some positive change for Music.SE using this meta site:

• create some "direct" posts, suggesting a couple of really useful changes, and then really try to gain support for them. In other words, try to rally around a "DO WE WANT THIS CHANGING?" type post. This way we can focus our efforts on making regular significant changes, if necessary. Users of Music.SE have encouraged support for the new MusicFans.SE in a pretty proactive way (on this meta site and in chat), so a similar level of action would be possible for our own site. The mark-up language suggestion seems like a good first change to get behind.
• a more convoluted, but democratic, way to focus upon which changes may be considered important by the Music.SE community, would be to create a community-wiki question, listing a number of changes suggested regularly and/or recently. Answers could argue for or against different ideas, but also act as a place for users to vote upon what changes they think are important. In theory, it would create a focal point for assessing what users feel "needs-to-be-done". On the upside, everything is one place and it would be easy to assess support; on the downside, somebody would need to put a bit of time into assessing what subjects have come up recently/regularly on this meta site.

Or, an even simpler focal-point-question. "What development do you think would most improve Music.SE?" Answers are given, arguing for useful changes, comments are made, voting shows what the community thinks is most important to them. The key to making this work is, again, getting regular users to encourage participation at a single point (i.e. a single question).

Answer 2

While the Meta here on Music might not be the most active, it does have attention from the Stack Exchange team. I think that there are not many issues raised that require attention from the team, but the ones about music notation that you refer to have been the most important issues.

The site already has jTab support, and I think the team did not want to implement anything more before the site graduated, and now when it has, this issue has got more attention. There are still some minor decisions left.