Periodically, the Community Team reviews sites for traffic, activity, and quality. This happens in conjunction with the Site Self-Evaluations the communities perform. Here's what I have observed after Italian's first 3 months in public beta and first self-eval.
The site is doing okay, but it's not going to last if we don't figure out a way to get more questions and more people. The site is small, and the core community even smaller. But quality appears very high, and - for the moment - participation by the tiny few of you who make up the core of this site is strong. The few of you who've made this site work thus far have my deepest respect, but presumably you also have lives and families and jobs and such. And the truth is, it wouldn't take too many of you dropping off to put this site in an unmaintainable position.
So it's time to think about whether there's anything you can do at this point to draw in additional expertise - tell your friends, colleagues, those you respect and have learned from or taught in the past... Encourage them to poke around a bit, ask a question or contribute an answer, and offer some assistance in learning how SE operates. You're doing great - the biggest thing this site needs right now is more of you doing great.
Additionally, do whatever you can to make sure there are plenty of interesting questions for both those newcomers and the small core community to answer. Questions are (naturally) a Q&A site's lifeblood. Without questions, there's no answering, voting, or commenting. Without questions, there's no possibility for growth. So start thinking about ways you can encourage each other to ask interesting questions to keep activity up and quality high.
Most importantly, I'd like to thank everyone for the time and effort you've all put in thus far. I have high hopes for Italian and I don't think it's in grave danger. French is a pretty similar site in terms of subject matter and structure, and this site is following a very similar pattern to how French did at the beginning of their public beta. They turned it around and began to grow and I don't doubt that Italian can follow suit.
