We have too many unanswered questions

Question

We've got a good set of seed questions to start the Beta with. I think we should refrain from asking any more seed questions. Please consider deleting any seed questions you have asked if they are "softball" type questions that have not gotten answers. These do not help the site.

We have 44 unanswered questions meaning only 40% of our questions have answers. Please look through the unaswered tab and:

• Answer any questions you feel comfortable answering. Take a moment to search Google Scholar or other resources to find an answer if you don't readily know one but are interested in the subject matter.
• Vote to close questions you don't feel are answerable, are not good fits for the site or you feel are low quality. Please leave a comment stating why you believe the question should be closed.
• Downvote low quality questions so that other users may identify, this can help us close them as well. Gathering enough close votes in a private beta is difficult.
• Upvote good answers you see (answers with no upvotes don't count as answers in the metric)
• Leave a comment asking for more details if you are unsure how a post should be answered or whether it should be closed.

Answer 1

This is mostly a cautionary tale, but "seeding" this site with questions simply to add to its bulk sounds helpful, but in all likely hood, it is actively harming this site. I wrote about this extensively in

Asking the First Questions

…but a few key points are most poignant.

I was a bit put off by the context implied by “seeding the site.” The word seeding suggests to me that we’re coming up with questions just for the sake of asking questions. My concern is, if people feel that the author doesn’t really care about the answer, the whole exercise would likely be perceived as a waste of time.

Sound familiar?

Users like to answer questions when they are helping people, and everyone loves to show off a bit on occasion. But users do not want to be given homework assignments with a bunch of busy work. This seeding has to stop. You're supposed to use this site to ask about problems you actually have; otherwise, this whole exercise will likely be perceived as a waste of time.

The Statistics

You have 49% of your questions answered (CogSci Statistics). Ouch, that's a far cry from the 93% average of the other sites (I don't recall a site ever falling below 70%). That in and of itself would be cause to shut down the site, if those stats continue. Folks who come here should have a reasonable expectation that their question will receive a good answer, otherwise it provides a poor user experience. Seeded questions draw attention away from real problems from people seeking help.

What should we do?

Stop seeding the site. Survey your content and take a good hard look at what is being asked. If it's an intriguing question that looks helpful to the person asking, answer it.

But if the question looks like the typical text book fare of any first-year CogSci class, or seeded from another forum, vote to close it as "not a real question." That sounds counter-productive and unhelpful, but read the first questions blog post again:

…you need a site where people are asking very interesting and intriguing questions, not the basic questions found on every other Q&A site…

The earliest questions on a site will set the tone and topic of the site for a long time.

Answer 2

I think these are great suggestions.

A quick look at our top users in terms of rep as of Jan 21st looks like this:

Answers   Questions
10        5  
7         10 
0         38
0         5
4         0
2         5
1         3

Obviously the flood (albeit well-meaning) of 38 questions by one user has potentially created an issue especially at this private beta phase in terms of getting a democratic sense of what the site is all about.

Personally, I'm open to others still asking questions in the private beta. In terms of defining the site, I think it's important to get input from others. If I were to suggest a general rule for the private beta period, it would be that a user should try to at least maintain equality between the number of questions they have asked and the number of answers they have provided. Of course, in the future when the site goes live, there always be a discrepancy between people who tend to ask questions and people who answer questions.

Answer 3

I also think this is a good idea. We curently have 724 unanswered questions (15% of all questions) and according to Area 51

90% answered is a healthy beta, 80% answered needs some work. In the beta it's especially important that when new visitors ask questions they usually get a good answer.

so we need to get the answer percentage up to at least 90% if we are to get this site out of beta, and therefore we have a mammoth task of answering a minimum of 220 unanswered questions. This will go up as more questions are asked.

I am steadily going through questions I can answer. It is easy to call them up. Either click on the link at the top of this answer, or just type in the search box at the top

answers:0 closed:no

Another point to note, is not just that we have unanswered questions, but that there are a lot of questions with just 1 answer and our answer ratio is 1.4

Again, Area 51 states:

[A ratio of] 2.5 answers per question is good, only 1 answer per question needs some work. On a healthy site, questions receive multiple answers and the best answer is voted to the top.