Before I get anywhere, let me convey my thanks to slhck for his help with the data visualization and his awesome R skills.
Having got that out of the way, let’s look at some stats involving Ask Ubuntu in the year 2013. There is no real purpose in this exercise other than whetting my appetite for numbers.
Let’s start with the big picture. At this point, I should state the data points are not cumulative and represent the state of the site during that period of time.
The total number of questions asked has almost tripled since 2011. Number of questions not being deleted has quite a linear growth as well. Remember, “questions” are deleted on Ask Ubuntu for a variety of reasons, including spam, offensive content and rants among others.
The percentage of questions closed to total questions asked has decreased over the years but the questions closed as duplicates has increased.
Breaking 2013 into months, we can see there are two peaks around 13.04 (2013-05) and 13.10 (2013-10) releases.
And what about the answers?
There is a steep increase in the absolute numbers of questions with zero answers. Questions with accepted answers has taken a hit and so does questions with multiple answers.
In the various months of 2013, yeah.. we have work to do on that. Yet to fully recover from 13.10 release.
How goes voting?
One of the selling points of Ask Ubuntu (being a part of Stack Exchange network of sites) is that it is community regulated (via votes among other means). 2013, however, is not a year of voting on Ask Ubuntu.
Despite having more questions asked compared to 2012, the number of questions with at least a positive score has decreased. Questions with 3 or more votes have decreased sharply as well.
Questions with no positive score have skyrocketed. Guess it’s time to pull our socks and vote more. Want to help? 
The monthly breakdown of 2013 seems to suggest a general decrease in votes as well.
Questions and traffic
For a site that is currently getting about 260k views per day, the following might be surprising.
50% of the questions asked in 2013 don’t have more than a 100 views, which is not particularly appeasing. It seems not a lot of questions are getting enough eye balls and are adding to the growing tally of tumbleweeds on the site.
Making the truth more obvious since the 90s.
Scores, views and answers combined
More page views clearly increase the possibility of a question getting either a vote or (hopefully) an answer.
The last couple months of 2013 have a higher number of lowly viewed questions. Guess they need a little time to garner more views.
If any data wiz out there wants to play with the data, here’s the spreadsheet. And that would be all from the numbers department this year.
