Are we becoming too Greek?

Question

This is the resurrection of an earlier (now deleted) answer of mine, which, as per the recommendation of durron597, has become a new question.

I took a look the other day at our tags. Here are our most popular ones:

• greek - 67 questions
• norse - 22 questions
• mythical-creatures - 16 questions
• sumerian - 12 questions
• gods - 11 questions
• egyptian - 10 questions
• mesopotamia - 10 questions
• everything-else - <10 questions per tag.

^{As of May 9, 2015 22:28 UTC}

We will (hopefully) enter public beta soon. New users often follow the pattern of questions on a given beta site. Monkey see, monkey do. If new users follow this trend, almost exactly ¹/₃ (currently 67 our of 200) of all our new questions will be greek.

Is this potentially a problem?

I should add that I've seen similar things happen on other beta sites, and the scope can get somewhat narrowed, though I can't prove that it dates back to activity in the site's private beta.

Answer 1

I don't think this is a problem.

Greek mythology is very popular; it's fairly well documented and the stories are good.

If you look at the tags on StackOverflow, Java, Javascript, and C# are at the top. Java has twice as many posts as Python, the #7 tag.

I have never seen anything to suggest that having a wide range of tag popularity is a problem, as long as we do our best as a community to make sure the questions in the other tags get answered, too.

We should revisit this when we go public, just in case, but I don't think the other mythologies will die then, either. And, of course, this is self correcting; those of us who think this is a problem will take the time to ask more questions in the less popular mythologies (which is already happening!). I wouldn't worry about it.

Answer 2

This is a problem: mythology is a huge topic, and if we focus on one tiny portion of the subject we will not realise our full potential.

However, this has an easy fix: make an effort to ask more non-greek questions. The more non-greek questions there are, the more likely someone will want to learn more and read a non-greek myth and thus ask more non-greek questions.

Answer 3

When most people think of mythology, Greek myths are the first thing that comes to mind (Norse second), so I think that distribution is natural.

I hate to ask questions in my speciality area- I either know a good answer or it's something pretty obscure (like hedgehog goddesses). Beyond that, most of my real questions are going to be about Greek things.