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The site has an Unanswered Questions list, and right now there are 94 questions on it. That's out of 7327 questions total, which puts us at 98.7% answered.

Questions appear on this list if they have no answers scored 1 or higher. That means we can do three things to make this list smaller:

  1. If a question is answered, but all the answers are scored 0 or lower, vote! If the answers are bad, downvote; if the answers are good, upvote. If the score on any of the answers gets up to 1, it'll fall off the list.

  2. If a question has no answers, post an answer! If a question is answered in the comments section, you can always post that comment as an answer; just mark it Community Wiki and make sure you give credit to the original commenter.

  3. If a question is unanswerable, unclear, or off-topic and slipped through the cracks, vote to close! That will remove it from the list.

Note that it doesn't matter whether the OP has accepted an answer. If it has an upvoted answer, it'll still be considered "answered" as far as this list is concerned.

Please don't upvote bad answers to remove a question from the list. In fact, if you see a bad answer upvoted to 1, you may want to downvote to get it onto the list. Why? Because unanswered questions get more attention. Community periodically bumps them to the top of the front page, and people can see a list of unanswered questions at any time.

With that in mind, if anyone would like to help make the list smaller, it would make the site a better place :-)


Excluding closed and deleted questions.

3 Answers 3

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I would like to point out that open unanswered questions are not necessarily a bad thing. Allowing some questions to be ignored is one legitimate way to deal with borderline out-of-scope, uninteresting questions.

In one extreme setting, the scope of this website would be perfectly well-defined and every question would be either in scope or out of scope by the well-defined criteria. No questions would be on the border line. Every in-scope question would be answered well, and every out-of-scope question would be closed. Open but unanswered questions could exist only as a temporary state, and they would have to be eventually either answered or closed, possibly after editing. Some time before, I tried to follow this model on the Stack Exchange websites where I was somewhat deeply involved.

But in reality, it is impossible to define the scope perfectly. For example, how much effort is needed before a translation question becomes in scope? Before, I voted to close questions if I did not think the asker showed sufficient effort. But I decided to change my attitude and trust more the “free market” in which a trade is fair if someone asks and someone answers. If just the asker has not shown enough effort to make me want to answer, I tend to just ignore it. If anyone thinks that the asker has shown enough effort and the question is worth answering, they should feel free to answer, although I would spend my time in something which I think is more useful. If no one thinks the question is worth spending their time, and if the asker still wants it to be answered, the asker should try better to lure potential answerers. This way, “sufficient” effort is determined by the free market, not by the policy maker. I think that it is a more healthy attitude to admit that some questions may not be closed (because they are not clearly off topic) but not interest anyone, either (because they are not in the scope enough).

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  • As well as closevoting, there's also the option to downvote a question, though I think it should be used sparingly.
    – Golden Cuy
    Dec 19, 2015 at 6:11
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I am sorry I had to downvote. The reason is, about your "order",

2.If a question has no answers, post an answer!

Nobody is obliged to answer to any question.

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  • And isn't it interesting tp think while before this site congraturated, the percentage of the answer had been 100%.....
    – user7644
    Dec 11, 2015 at 4:05
  • No, it's always hovered around the 98-99% mark. We've always had a few unanswered questions, and most of the questions were already on the list before graduation.
    – user1478
    Dec 11, 2015 at 4:14
  • The way this question is phrased does not imply any sort of obligation, by the way. I agree with you that no one is obligated to post any answers. I'm simply listing ways people can make the list smaller. You're free to ignore this post.
    – user1478
    Dec 11, 2015 at 4:18
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    Fine, by the way, would you feel prompted to answer whenever you answer to any question, 2 downvotes simulateously always come without any reason attached? What do you think about the effect of what these dudes are doing?
    – user7644
    Dec 11, 2015 at 14:07
  • It should be" If a question has no answers, please post an answer." Oct 11, 2016 at 19:57
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Another option is to add a bounty to the question if you're interested in it.

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  • I like this approach, and I tried it by placing a few bounties last week. It doesn't always work, though. I think the most knowledgable users on SE sites tend not to care much about reputation. It works sometimes, though :-)
    – user1478
    Dec 19, 2015 at 8:56

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