According to the About page:
Public betas typically last from 60 to 90 days, although they can go on longer.
Our site appears healthy yet it has now been in public beta for 117 days.
We... Probably should change that text.
The original design called for a site to either graduate or be closed within 90 days. It quickly became clear that a lot of decent sites can take a fair bit longer to either reach sustainable mass or clearly fail:
How long can a site stay in beta?
The simple answer is, it takes as long as it takes. We’ll wait. If a site needs more activity, go out and evangelize it. As long as your site shows steady progress and continues to make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions, it will march on. We don’t want to kill a site because it hasn’t reached full status in 90 days. Nor do we want to set a hard 90-day limit and launch a site too soon.
There’s more to the health of a Stack Exchange site than having a lot of questions and answers. There’s an economy to the site with reputation as its currency, and voting drives that economy. A site absolutely needs on-going, sustained voting to build a class of leaders that help run and govern the site. Without leadership, there can be no community.
So from this point forward, the graduation date of a site will depend heavily on having enough users with sufficient reputation to properly lead and govern the site. It’s much more important to graduate a site when it has become self-sustaining, and has established a healthy community of avid users, closers, and editors — rather than imposing an arbitrary 90-day limit.
Thus, the order of launch will favor those beta sites which have achieved the most “excellent” ratings on our Area 51 stats panel. For everyone else — keep going!
See: Mathematica Area 51 stats
FWIW: we generally evaluate each site for graduation-readiness every 60 days. We're currently about two weeks behind schedule, so I can't say if Mathematica is ready yet, but the stats look pretty good - the only thing slightly worrying is the number of users with high reputation (thresholds for various privileges change upon graduation, necessitating a reasonable number of users with at least 500, 2K, 3K, and 10K reputations in order for the site to operate properly). This also ties into the ability to hold moderator elections, which are generally held shortly after graduation.
/review page shows a different view for different folks. For instance, I don't see any posts in there (probably because I've cast a vote on most of them or reviewed and dismissed it)
What I generally find puzzling is why so many of us want to graduate a.s.a.p. What is it that all these folks anticipate so impatiently that would happen upon graduation? I mean, does everyone who is in favor of graduating now realize what it'll be like? Ok, let me tell you what's my picture:
Many more basic, lower quality questions
Many more beginner users
Much less consistent voting (not only different questions / answers to them would receive relatively very different weights - which experts often would find inadequate, but also within the same question, truly great answers won't always win)
Much heavier load on all experts and advanced users to keep things under control, and most importantly, preserve the coherence of our community, the culture we've developed, etc.
To my mind, at any given time, we (as a community having experts, advanced users, intermediate users and beginners) can handle only so many basic questions, and beginner users who ask them. As we grow, we get more of the intermediate-level users who share our culture and are ready to take some of that load off the core of experts. We have now a great proportion / ratio of experts / advanced users / intermediate users / beginners, and I think this is one big reason why we are doing so well as a community. In other words, It is this power law with a much steeper power which makes us stand out (because it reflects an unusual number / proportion of experts willing to help). However, the other side of this is that, if you continue the curve to the other end, we have less room for beginner users than other communities (I mean the proportion, not the absolute number), at any given time (this room grows as we grow). This is a speculation on my side, but IMO power law is important, since it happens naturally in scale-free networks, which are characteristic descriptions for systems growing organically. Graduate now, and you will create a second exponent, with, I think, disastrous consequences for us.
Mathematica SE, as well as other similar SE sites, is a modern system of knowledge transfer (thanks to the SE team). We are attracted and willing to spend our time here because we see that this system is effective. It is effective because we have a coherent community with a certain culture, ways of doing things, informal rules, etc. But we are still very young as a community. Scaling this effectiveness to larger community size is a non-trivial task. For knowledge transfer to be effective at the larger scale, we need more intermediate users willing to participate and serving as a bridge between experts and more beginner users. It is not accidental that, while we are doing more than well in numbers of experts / advanced users, our number of intermediate users is just a fraction more than is requested. Besides that, we need also more questions already answered, more "canonical" / "generic" answers (which serve to prevent duplication of efforts and fragmentation of knowledge), more people who are aware of past questions and generally carry our common knowledge, etc.
To summarize, I have a very strong feeling that we are not yet ready for rapid expansion. All those parameters which SE team introduced to measure the degree of our readiness for graduation are there for a reason. Right now, I think that the longer we stay in Beta and accumulate critical mass (in many aspects), the better it would be for us (of course, I don't mean staying in Beta for years). We have previously happily existed on Stack Overflow for years, and, while there were certain problems and inconveniences due to restrictions of SO format and misunderstandings with users coming from other tags, I think we were doing great. Right now, we already accumulate new users at the rate unthinkable for the SO Mathematica tag, and have other signs of rapid but healthy growth.
So, what's the rush now? My two cents.
EDIT
I highly recommend to read this blog post, coming from an SO user who was consistently within top 10-20 SO users for extended periods of time while still on SO.
As I pointed out above, our core of experts is almost as numerous as those found on RPG, Skeptics, and even User Experience, and it is growing. The difficulty is we do not have the same depth of field as those three sites. They have existed longer than us, so that is not surprising. But, I believe we need more intermediate users to make graduation viable, and there is only one way for that to occur: time. Time, and of course our selfless (shameless?) self-promotion on sites like reddit.com.
That said, I would like to propose a graduation date that will give us time: October 17. That way we can announce our graduation at the Wolfram Technology Conference, and possibly send some of our users to it. Thoughts?
