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If you take a look at our states on Area51, the two big areas that are still a problem for the beta are the rate of unanswered questions (which is close to 25%), and the average number of answers per question (which is about 1). These are related statistics.

Looking through our queue of unanswered questions, there are some that might be answerable, but that I cannot answer, and many that look unanswerable or very low quality. Many of the questions are very old.

Should we make a more concerted effort to close questions that are old and unanswerable? What criteria should we use to decide if a question meets that standard?

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  • $\begingroup$ Note that "unanswered questions" in SE context is "questions with no upvoted or accepted answers", so if there are good enough answers without upvote, consider upvote them (if you think they worth it) to remove them from "unanswered" state. $\endgroup$
    – Andrew T.
    Commented Aug 30, 2018 at 9:47
  • $\begingroup$ @AndrewT. That makes sense, but we have some 350-400 questions with no answers at all. $\endgroup$
    – John Doucette
    Commented Aug 30, 2018 at 11:21
  • $\begingroup$ @ManuelRodriguez That also makes sense, and I have done so. Many of the remaining questions look difficult or impossible to answer however, hence this question. $\endgroup$
    – John Doucette
    Commented Sep 2, 2018 at 11:23

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If a question is unanswerable, it should be closed, be it old or new. This is more or less what closing is for.

But don't do it for the sake of Area 51 statistics. Those statistics outlived their usefulness, as did Area 51 itself. The post Graduation, site closure, and a clearer outlook on the health of SE sites explains that already in 2015, those stats did not really matter for site graduation or closure.

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    $\begingroup$ That's interesting and makes sense, but what criteria do you think should be used to decide if a question is unanswerable? For example, if a question is new and I don't know how to answer it, I am sometimes pleasantly surprised to see someone else give a useful answer soon after. If it's 6 months old, if I don't know the answer, it starts to seem more reasonable to guess that the question is too poorly worded, or too exotic, to ever receive a good answer. $\endgroup$
    – John Doucette
    Commented Aug 29, 2018 at 13:59
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Speaking as a pro tem mod, we see a lot of single close votes, but tend to give the OP the benefit of the doubt, and err on the side of caution.

My feeling is the best method to increase closure of these "grey area" questions is to keep attracting knowledgeable contributors, and supporting those contributors by upvoting good questions and answers, so that more users have informal moderator privileges. (i.e. I'm personally more comfortable with closures being consensus-based because, as JD notes, it can be a difficult determination, even for qualified individuals.)

That said, I'd like to prune away as much of the noise and dead-weight as possible to improve our stats. I'm wondering if we might start a chat thread to address questions in limbo, so that if contributors make a strong case for closure, the moderators can more confidently take action.

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    $\begingroup$ Some users don't Know they can actually accept an answer...I also didn't know when I was new. $\endgroup$
    – user9947
    Commented Aug 30, 2018 at 4:24
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    $\begingroup$ @DuttaA agreed. (i try to gently remind new OPs to upvote if the answer is useful, and formally accept if it answers the question, when I notice comment discussion but no upvotes.) we've definitely got to support each other to build this community. $\endgroup$
    – DukeZhou Mod
    Commented Aug 30, 2018 at 17:08
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I make a point of visiting the unanswered queue on all sites that I am active on. It's possible to earn an Explainer, Revival, Necromancer or other badge available to new questions.

We should run through the queue when we visit here.

The site Interpersonal.SE has an unanswered queue style similar to ours (single tab), while LifeHacks.SE has the advantage of a multi-level Unanswered Questions queue; with additional tabs for "my tags", "newest", "votes" and "no answers" permitting better differentiation. Both those sites have a similar total number of questions as we do, yet the number of unanswered questions is near zero.

The remaining question is do we want a multi-level queue like LifeHacks has? I'm new to AI.SE, so I'd prefer a senior member put in a feature request over at meta.SE.

Be certain to improve and better these similar requests that became ignored or status-declined:

Fortunately, automatic deletions are performed on old questions:

If the question is more than 365 days old, and ...

  • has a score of 0 or less, or a score of 1 or less in case the owner's account is deleted

  • has no answers

  • is not locked

  • has view count <= the age of the question in days times 1.5

  • has 1 or 0 comments

  • isn't on a meta site

... it will be automatically deleted.

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