This is a direct reply to Grace Note's recent CR review, more precisely the following part:
(emphasis mine)
Unanswered
Tying in to all of the above is one of the most pressing concerns about the site I had in my own review, which is the gigantic pool of unanswered questions. There are, at the time of this writing, 1237 questions without any upvoted answers, a whopping 1010 of which have absolutely no answers at all. That’s over 10% of the site’s questions, sitting untouched and barely considered to be alive. These questions range from the site’s birth in 2011 all the way to modern day 2013. About 25% of these questions result in users never returning after a week, from a rudimentary query.
This isn’t a small number. This is a huge chunk of the site that’s basically just a black hole of despair, swallowing everything without giving anything back. And there’s a simple enough fix to this - clean up the unanswered questions. A large amount of what I see from these is questions that get a fair amount of comments back-and-forth when first asked, but then the entire dialogue is dropped and no one on either side follows up. The questions essentially become abandoned, not unlike the ultimate fate of this site if people don’t keep up.
Ladies & gentlemen, we have a problem. Let's fix it - that's what we do best, isn't it?
Go to the Unanswered questions: there's a counter there, showing the number of questions with no upvoted answers.
Select the my tags tab and VOTE:
(yes I have very few favorite tags - I'll fix that very soon)
Select the no answers tab and post an answer somewhere - we have to bring this number down, ASAP - this is the whopping 1010 Grace is talking about:
Monitor the 1,237 questions without any upvoted answers figure from Grace's post on the votes tab:
Your ammunition: 40 votes per day, unlimited answers.
Every unanswered question is a zombie.
Every unvoted good answer is a target.
Ready? GO!
Mission Status:
This section tracks the metrics at regular intervals, at or around 12:00AM UTC. Each week is divided in 3 rounds (3-2-2 days), where the number of Questions with no answers /zombies and the number of Questions with no upvoted answers /targets at that point in time, is used to calculate the net score for that round; the net score is then divided by the number of days in the round.
It's important to understand that those are net figures; they include incoming zombies so they are inherently skewed (downwards). We'll get a much better picture once the data explorer allows us to dig up our own data. I'm including the total number of incoming zombies at the end of the week, under the debrief section.
Incoming zombies are acquired by searching for questions here "is:question created:yyyy-MM-dd"
- Round 0 (Grace's observations):
- 1,010 Questions with no answers
- 1,237 Questions with no upvoted answers
- CR is 88% answered
Week 1
Round 1 (2013-11-19 / 3 days):
- 969 Questions with no answers (-41 | 13.7/day)
- 1,113 Questions with no upvoted answers (-124 | 41.3/day)
- 54 incoming
Round 2 (2013-11-21 / 5 days):
- 918 Questions with no answers (-51 | 25.5/day)
- 1,045 Questions with no upvoted answers (-68 | 34.0/day)
- 41 incoming
Round 3 (2013-11-23 / 7 days):
- 911 Questions with no answers (-7 | 3.5/day)
- 1,008 Questions with no upvoted answers (-37 | 18.5/day)
- 31 incoming
Debrief:
- 99 zombies down | 14.1/day
- 229 targets hit | 32.7/day
- 126 incoming zombies | 18.0/day
- Milestone: CR is now 90% answered
Week 2
Round 4 (2013-11-26 / 10 days):
- 884 Questions with no answers (-27 | 9.0/day)
- 972 Questions with no upvoted answers (-36 | 12.0/day)
- 53 incoming
Round 5 (2013-11-28 / 12 days):
- 868 Questions with no answers (-16 | 8.0/day)
- 944 Questions with no upvoted answers (-28 | 14.0/day)
- 48 incoming
Round 6 (2013-11-30 / 14 days):
- 862 Questions with no answers (-6 | 3.0/day)
- 905 Questions with no upvoted answers (-39 | 19.5/day)
- 41 incoming
Debrief:
- 49 zombies down | 7.0/day
- 103 targets hit | 14.7/day
- 142 incoming zombies | 20.3/day
- CR is now 90.9% answered
Lock & Load people, Lock & Load!
As of 2013-12-04 04:25 UTC...
Status is 843 unanswered questions zombies, and 857 with no upvoted answers.
That's something to be proud of. Thanks to all who participated!!
I call that mission accomplished. What's next? - Guess:
843 zombies is still 843 zombies too many... keep answering!!
As of 2013-12-18, the number of remaining zombies dropped by another 100. We now stand at 743 zombies, and 785 without upvoted answers. CR is 93% answered.
As of 2014-02-02, we now stand at 754 zombies. CR is 94% answered.