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We currently have just over 38,500 unanswered questions.

After reviewing about 500 of them a while ago, in a totally unsystematic manner, I concluded that <2% are truly reasonable questions awaiting a reasonable response.

Maybe we could work through these questions and:

  • answer the ones that deserve an answer,
  • do whatever we do with duplicates, and
  • downvote the poor questions.

In quite a few I think a nascent answer may be in the comments and others have a solid answer that has not been accepted, so we could ask the question asker to accept an answer.

Do we have a higher percentage than other comparable exchanges?

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    Closely related: questions answered by comments and Does GIS have a low voting problem?. The latter provides partial answers to your initial questions. Commented Nov 6, 2012 at 17:16
  • This is now featured. Could you either provide an update in the question or post an answer with new statistics to see how whether it's going the right way or not? Commented Jun 19, 2017 at 13:44
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    @Mast it has been updated already. If you click the link at the top it will take you to the unanswered questions page which says there are (as at time of writing this comment) 18,500 questions. Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 3:43
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    @Mast 18 months ago we were at 15-16K unanswered and now we are at 18.5K so, unless users want to volunteer more time towards answering and voting, we may need to get stricter on question quality to help line them up for the volunteer resources which we are able to muster. On the positive side 18 months ago we were at 73% answered whereas we are now at 78%. Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 6:15

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At 77% answered we are better on that particular statistic than Stack Overflow (everyone's measuring stick) at 69% and Cross Validated (which launched at the same time as GIS SE) at 65% - see http://stackexchange.com/sites#percentanswered - but I am all for trying to get us up into the 80s (or even the 90s, which is what Beta sites strive for). I would tell you our precise ranking if I did not have to count to find it: Numbering the List View of the SE Sites site?

Only four sites out of 181 receive more questions per day than we do AND have a higher percentage of questions answered than we do. The top six sites on the Stack Exchange network by this measure are:

In many cases to move a question off our unanswered list, all it needs is for someone to upvote at least one answer to > 0 votes.

Improving wording of "non-reproducible" custom close reason? was posted here, and then implemented, to give us a slightly stronger tool to use to close some of the questions that are in no shape to be answered.

If you are wondering which tags result in the most unanswered questions then this SEDE query can be used to list them. The snapshots below are ordered first by the number of unanswered questions, and then by the percentage of unanswered questions.

enter image description here

enter image description here

I found the query to do the above via asking a Meta SE question: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/270413/identifying-tags-with-poorest-answer-rates-on-a-site

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  • On Spanish SE, the answered count is 100%, but it only gets 2.9 questions a day, which makes is somewhat less impressive. I suspect that when a site is in beta it attracts a higher proportion of experts/enthusiasts for the subject, which explains the high answer ratio. As a site gets established, the ratio of awful, unanswerable questions inevitably increases . I spent some time on the triage review queue on SO last week, as I simply had to get the El Dorado hat, a truly depressing experience. So, actually, a lower number might be indicative of success. Commented Dec 22, 2015 at 9:39
  • This makes Sense. Commented Dec 22, 2015 at 12:48
  • @polygeo Nice! Thanks for doing that, and thanks for providing a link to explore the tags!!! Commented Dec 22, 2015 at 23:40
  • Most of such tags are related somehow with 'serving GIS data' (interesting). Commented Dec 23, 2015 at 13:01
  • Yes as a percent the serving GIS amount is high but in raw count the two major softwares are ~6k. I am up to about 10! Only 59,990 to go. Commented Dec 23, 2015 at 14:49
  • @JohnBarça Coming from a beta site, I would say that it's the lower question rate. The lower question rate allows us to focus and improve each question individually, while providing it many quality answers. On Open Source SE, I've actually noticed that when we get a bounce in questions, the number of answers actually goes down. But I highly doubt that it would have anything to do with an "expert/enthusiast" ratio. Commented Jul 8, 2016 at 1:45
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    I thought I would start making a dent into the unanswered questions, starting with Postgis, which currently stands at 21% based on above query, mostly because there are some quite interesting questions in there and it helps clean up the site. I answered this question. The OP hasn't visited for over a year, so I'm certainly not expecting it to be accepted. I didn't get an upvote, even though I think it is a pretty acceptable answer. Commented Nov 5, 2016 at 15:22
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    Do we have some means to monitor this situation beyond the late answers review queue. I am really way beyond the time when I cared much about rep, but it would be nice for it to be acknowledged, and more to the point, come off the unanswered stat count, or if it is not a good answer, perhaps someone could let me know why not. Commented Nov 5, 2016 at 15:24
  • Thankyou for trying to help @JohnBarça and I agree that it can be a bit disheartening to go to the effort to provide answers to questions that no one else is attempting. As far as I know the system currently relies on the late answers queue or the active list to spot the questions that I would like to see upvotes on (when they deserve it). Commented Nov 5, 2016 at 22:20
  • Alternatively, users could find yours using gis.stackexchange.com/search?q=user%3A429+is%3Aanswer+score%3A0 or to see that there are over 11,000 that potentially could come off our list with a single vote see gis.stackexchange.com/… Commented Nov 5, 2016 at 22:23
  • but I am all for trying to get us up into the 90s - Is this still your goal @PolyGeo? Or do you think it is unrealistic/unachievable? If you think it is reachable, how do we do it? Commented Nov 27, 2017 at 4:21
  • @Midavalo I think 90+ would be sensational, and 80-90 eminently achievable, because we are currently at 78%. To achieve it I think we just need to be a bit tougher on old unanswered questions, while holding a minimum standard on new questions about where we have it. If a question is old and unanswered, then I start to think that it is as much the responsibility of its asker, as it is the potential answerers, to get it self-answered, closed or deleted. If the asker has lost interest in getting their question answered, or has left the site, then a close reason should be looked for. Commented Nov 27, 2017 at 4:39
  • @Midavalo Also, if closure sometimes seems too harsh then a downvote can always nudge an unanswered question towards the Roomba. Downvote criteria include "unclear" and "not useful", and I think old unanswered meandering questions can often easily qualify as either. Commented Nov 27, 2017 at 4:56
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My opinion is that there are too many questions that get answered in comments and this has been discussed previously at:

I think that we should try to encourage people to write answers.

To qualify as a long enough answer, just 2-3 sentences is needed.

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I've been looking into the open questions (only the ones related to tools I know).

One part of them contains potential solutions or pointers to solution in comments. Someone would have to migrate the main points from comment to answer but even then if the orignal author doesn't frequent the site anymore, they will never be accepted.

Some questions turn into feature requests. They ask if something is possible, the answer is "No, file a feature request". Usually nobody writes such an answer and/or accepts it.

Other questions require extensive knowledge about data and use case which the author can/does not provide. I guess those could be closed.

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    Good assessment. Regarding questions in which the OP will most likely never return, it's my understanding that an answer only needs an upvote to count, not an actual marking as accepted. When you look at the "unanswered" tab, it states "with no upvoted answer." So would upvoting one of the provided answers help? Commented Nov 6, 2012 at 19:35
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    Brett, that gets back to the previous thread on low voting, where it has been pointed out that many questions (and answers) are so specialized that few community members feel qualified to vote on them. I don't think we want arbitrarily (and perhaps ignorantly) to upvote answers just to increase the answer ratio on our site. Assuming you agree, just who exactly is going to do the upvoting? (I periodically look through unanswered questions and have voted wherever I can, so I'm confident that I personally would be of no help in adding votes at this point.) Commented Nov 7, 2012 at 17:11
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There is a search strategy I sometimes use to try and find the Unanswered questions where I am most likely to be able to make a difference.

  1. First I click the Unanswered option in the left sidebar:

enter image description here

  1. Then I click My Tags

enter image description here

  1. I then look along the bottom for the lowest voted Unanswered questions with my tags

enter image description here

Amongst these there are many that have an answer, but not one that has been upvoted, which makes them count as Unanswered. If there is a reasonable answer present I upvote it.

Reviewing some of them makes it apparent that answering them was either harder in the past or that no one understanding the question, with time to answer it, had done so, which makes some easy to answer.

There are often others there that match the criteria seen in the Deleting/Closing pointless questions? Q&A so they make good candidates for close voting (often as "non-reproducible" or "unclear" or "too broad" or "needs code snippet", whichever is appropriate).

If anyone is keen to make a dent in the current 36,000+ Unanswered questions you may like to try the same or a similar search strategy.

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Just to bring this question up to date and back into the fold, here is some updated data on our site's answer rate. The Stack Exchange Data Explorer has a wealth of information that can be extracted with queries such as this one: Is the rate of answered questions declining?

The rate of questions with answers has slipped from 90% to 77% since Jan of 2013:

date answered total ratio ----------------------------------- 5/1/2011 2459 2515 98% 6/1/2011 2836 2913 97% 7/1/2011 3203 3292 97% 8/1/2011 3542 3659 97% 9/1/2011 3893 4033 97% 10/1/2011 4213 4376 96% 11/1/2011 4564 4767 96% 12/1/2011 4899 5130 95% 1/1/2012 5173 5434 95% 2/1/2012 5538 5843 95% 3/1/2012 5995 6339 95% 4/1/2012 6479 6884 94% 5/1/2012 7062 7554 93% 6/1/2012 7725 8294 93% 7/1/2012 8355 9022 93% 8/1/2012 8999 9775 92% 9/1/2012 9604 10480 92% 10/1/2012 10176 11157 91% 11/1/2012 10918 12017 91% 12/1/2012 11710 12958 90% 1/1/2013 12354 13722 90% 2/1/2013 13137 14686 89% 3/1/2013 13819 15551 89% 4/1/2013 14585 16623 88% 5/1/2013 15317 17664 87% 6/1/2013 16032 18720 86% 7/1/2013 16675 19685 85% 8/1/2013 17364 20779 84% 9/1/2013 18057 21844 83% 10/1/2013 18757 22907 82% 11/1/2013 19525 24140 81% 12/1/2013 20189 25247 80% 1/1/2014 20758 26230 79% 2/1/2014 21518 27477 78% 3/1/2014 22151 28744 77%

If you compare this with other mature sites (by switching the site selector at the bottom of the query page) you'll see a similar trend. This obviously does not answer why this is happening, but I would assume it's a sign of maturity and probably closely follows the site's user population.

I found another very telling query here: Number of users answering or questioning.

Year Quarter Questioning Answering ---- ------- ----------- --------- 2009 3 1 1 2010 1 2 2 2010 2 2 8 2010 3 215 253 2010 4 231 226 2011 1 382 330 2011 2 497 396 2011 3 533 404 2011 4 554 424 2012 1 796 550 2012 2 1209 670 2012 3 1259 772 2012 4 1475 822 2013 1 1743 974 2013 2 1918 1007 2013 3 1962 995 2013 4 2058 1033 2014 1 1693 819

This seems to confirm something that I've suspected has been going on, which is that there are a whole lot more people asking questions than answering questions than there used to be.

This is probably a natural progression with site maturity. When a site is young it is filled with enthusiastic, knowledgeable users who have been around since the dawn of (the site's) time and are both knowledgeable with the site (they know, for example, that answers yield twice the reputation that questions do) and the subject matter. As time goes on and word gets out about the site being a great resource to ask questions, the demographics change and you get a whole lot more people looking for information rather than offering it.

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    +1, but I think we can do better with more pro voting attitude around here. Commented Mar 4, 2014 at 19:55
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    +1 and it may be worth mentioning that you would expect Questions available to Answer for 3.25 years will have a higher probability of being answered (or closed) than those there for only 30 days. Commented Mar 4, 2014 at 21:52
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    That's a good point, the query probably does not account for when the question was answered. That's probably also why the number apparently never goes up. Commented Mar 5, 2014 at 0:01
  • It's a pity the Visits per day data is not accessible to graph - I suspect that would give the clearest picture of an SE site's health over time. Commented Mar 5, 2014 at 12:11
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    @PolyGeo Maybe not, check out this site: quantcast.com/gis.stackexchange.com -- according to that our traffic has basically gone up by 5x since 2011. Commented Mar 5, 2014 at 17:47
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    There is another factor that we cannot take into account with these kinds of queries. Some unanswered questions are deleted after 1 year: meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006 Commented Mar 5, 2014 at 20:49
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    There is a good analysis on Meta SO here: meta.stackexchange.com/a/143137 Commented Mar 5, 2014 at 20:57
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    Thanks for providing these numbers - all in all it looks like GIS SE is healthy enough. Commented Mar 6, 2014 at 2:45
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I think a lot of the problem is that so many of the unanswered questions are basically unanswerable. We get a lot of people who come to the site with a single specific problem who do not or can not provide enough detail to generate an answer and then leave the site when an answer is not forthcoming.

This will also discourage people from answering older questions, as the person they are trying to help appears to be long gone.

A moderator flag of Unanswerable could be useful as a way of identifying such questions, allowing a distinction to be made between these questions and good questions which have not yet been answered for other reasons.

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    I like your idea. But what would "unanswerable" do that closing does not accomplish? After all, if there are questions that do not have enough detail to allow answering, they ought to be closed under existing guidelines. Commented Nov 7, 2012 at 17:08
  • That is a good point. Maybe unanswerable is the wrong term, I was trying to convey a state somewhere between an active, valid question and a closed, poor question. So that users can focus their efforts on answering questions that will actually benefit other users. Commented Nov 8, 2012 at 8:31
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    Maybe we should try something like cleanup day? But instead of cleaning up the titles, we flag questions that need to be closed. Commented Nov 10, 2012 at 14:39
  • That sounds like a great idea. Commented Nov 10, 2012 at 16:58
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The others have identified the reasons why, but one possible solution:

Back when I first joined the site a few months ago, I went through a period where after checking the days questions, I'd use the rest of my 40 daily votes to try and vote up answers to questions that appeared to be correct (as well as under-rated questions) but hadn't been yet. Even managed to answer one or two as well.

I did this by going to "Unanswered", sorting by "newest" and then going to the very last page. Currently page 43 when using 50 a page and then working forward. It doesn't take that long though of course with only 40 votes a day I only managed to get through probably 2-3 thousand before I gave up.

Other folks may therefore want to try similar (although not everyone should start at the very "end" of time).

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I also think that the lack of specificity to GIS in the FAQ has been part of the reason for the lower answer rate. GIS questions tend to be highly technical in nature and very often question askers do not provide enough information or structure their question in such a way that it can be reasonably answered. A better FAQ could help.

Related: (How) can we improve our FAQ?

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    A nice notion, but remember that not many people necessarily read the FAQ. Commented Nov 12, 2012 at 12:24
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    @GIS-Jonathan I think that's part of the problem. I don't think we want people who haven't read the FAQ to run around loose ;-) Commented Dec 19, 2012 at 13:06
  • @R.K. - I can't say I've read the FAQ..... ;-) Commented Jan 4, 2013 at 11:53
  • @R.K. - Huh, we have a FAQ? The problem is not that people are running around loose, not reading a FAQ, it is that the site has a massive weakness when it comes to existence and access to a FAQ. Commented Jun 11, 2014 at 20:04
  • @martinf do you mean the Help Center? What was previously known as the FAQ is now the Help Center. If you mean frequently asked GIS questions, we have the beginnings of one here: Do we need a list of canonical questions? Commented Jun 11, 2014 at 21:16
  • I meant a GIS FAQ (and didn't realize about FAQ being the old name for Help). You have a good list at "Do we need..." but i don't know how we'd use it. Commented Jun 11, 2014 at 23:33
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(Note that it is now more than 30k unanswered, 77% answered out of all questions)

I see at least these reasons:

  1. Some questions are answerable but hard, and it may take years for someone with the right knowledge to answer

  2. It is not as lucrative (for the typical SO user who might be able to answer those that are programmatic in nature) in terms of effort-to-reputation ratio. If they have time to answer a GIS.se question, that time may be better spent on SO or picking up new tech or just working (for my work, GIS is an important but only a very small aspect, making money is far more impt).

  3. GIS support channels are fragmented across SE, Reddit, ESRI, mailing lists, github issues etc. Some users got put off by SE culture so they are driven towards other channels after negative experience. They may still come back through search engine but active participation is not their goal, they only want the information they came for and move on.

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