How to decrease the number of unanswered questions?

Question

On SO, the percentage of unanswered questions is 27%. On cross validated, 39%.

On cross validated, there is a lot of unanswered questions. I suggest it is due to the high technical level required to answer them. I have myself huge difficulties to answer most of the questions.

Is there ways to decrease this percentage?

Should we encourage people with unanswered question to reformulate their question or to step down a level in the difficulty? Or to expand furthermore the problem?

Is there best practices in that cases, where you are willing to help but the questions are one step ahead of your competencies?

I also hope to get advice to make my questions clearer, to get response to my answers. But if these thought could help.

Answer 1

It is worth considering that an unanswered question is defined as a question that has no upvoted (or accepted) answers and is not closed. Also, the community user 'bumps' one unanswered question per hour to the top of the main page, which provides an opportunity for them to be addressed.

From these points, I would make a couple of tentative suggestions to any who wish to help lower our unanswered question rate: When you see an unanswered question bumped by the community user, take a look at it.

1. Often, these threads have very low views and have answers without any upvotes, perhaps because no one has ever paid any attention to them. If there are any answers, see if they might merit an upvote (cf., CrossValidated's rather extreme up-voting problem).
2. Also often, in my opinion, questions are not quite clear enough to really be answerable. I will typically give the OP the benefit of the doubt in these cases, possibly leaving a comment prompting them to provide needed information. However, the threads bumped by the community user are all at least one month old. It is common for a drive-by asker to leave a marginally clear / unclear question, not return to monitor the progress of the thread, and be long gone. Clicking on the OP's username will take you to their page where you can see if they are an active user and when they last showed up on the site. You can make a reasonable guess about whether they will return to their question. A question that may not be quite clear enough to be answered with an OP who will probably never return can be closed as unclear what you're asking (cf., Should the standards for closing questions be relaxed somewhat for old questions?).

These are actions that should be doable even by someone who feels the questions are "one step ahead of [their] competencies". I strongly suspect that if all the questions that do have upvotable answers were given just one upvote, and all the not really quite clear enough questions where the OP will likely never return to clarify them were closed, our unanswered question rate would be much lower.

Answer 2

Should we encourage people with unanswered question to reformulate their question or to step down a level in the difficulty? Or to expand furthermore the problem?

Yes we should encourage people to make their questions easier to follow. In many cases more explanation of the background, or of the aims of their analysis, or the addition of an example^† to illustrate the issue, would help. On the other hand, extraneous material & excessive detail is off-putting. But we can't really tell them to ask an easier question just because the one they want to ask is too difficult.

Is there best practices in that cases, where you are willing to help but the questions are one step ahead of your competencies?

Well you can do some research^‡, or perhaps provide a partial answer if appropriate. But if you can't answer, you can't answer—keep an eye open for questions you can.

If you think you know the answer, but aren't completely sure, give it anyway. Of course don't pretend to a certainty you don't have, explain your reasoning, & provide any relevant references. Even if you happen to be quite wrong you might provoke someone into writing a better answer or suggesting corrections to yours—the person who asked the question, you, & future readers all win.

† Minimal working examples can be as useful in Statistics as in programming.

‡ A good place to start researching is, of course, Cross Validated; I suspect there are many duplicates & near-duplicates among unanswered questions. Sometimes a question just needs to be flagged as a duplicate; sometimes a short answer explaining just how answers to a linked post or posts relate to it is needed.

Answer 3

(In this answer I leave aside the strategy of "find questions you know the answer to and answer them" ... since I take that as sufficiently obvious to everyone.)

1. A lot of unanswered questions could probably close as unclear, too broad, off-topic or duplicate. So can vote-to-close or flag (as appropriate to what privileges you have) when you come across them.

2. A lot of questions have answers or part-answers in comments. If you see a question that - between all the comments - seems to be largely answered, you should feel free to put together the relevant parts and post an answer. (If you're essentially just quoting a comment or two, you need to credit the author or authors, but I think answers in comments are otherwise fair game. Some other SE sites delete any comment that has even a small part of an answer as a matter of course; that's not how we work, but we could be a lot better about taking answers in comments to actual answers.)

3. A lot of new questions are really not clearly explained; anything you can do to encourage or guide new posters to produce answerable questions will help. (I expect many of us could answer more questions if the effort involved in getting a lot of our questions to a state where they can be answered at all were not taking so much time.)

Answer 4

Some questions are unanswered even though they are interesting, well informed, well expressed, and well posed. I assume they are unanswered because the expertise to answer the questions does not exist on this forum. So, "How to decrease the number of unanswered questions?" Answer: CrossValidated somehow needs to attract more experts who could answer these questions. How to do that? These experts need to know that CrossValidated exists, so advertising to them might help. They need it to be worth their while to participate. The most obvious reward is money. CrossValidated pays with reputation points, but experts know they're good already and may not be motivated by that.