Unanswered questions - what to do?

Question

Ask Ubuntu currently has the lowest Percent Answered of any Stack Exchange site.

What do you think about this, and what should be done about it?

Part of the problem is the attitude of questions asked, with little info provided, and often about old or different systems. Also, once answered, the OP does not always bother to mark it as answered.

Apart from that, large amount is probably due to [duplicate] nature of flagging, even if the duplicate question is out of date or irrelevant. This can be a good thing, but considering that most other sites, with a similar amount of traffic manage a much higher answering rate, what could be improved upon?

Update 20140308:

Alright, currently AskUbuntu is the second lowest, due to this apparently month old site - but still doing quite badly out of 116 sites...

Answer 1

I'm not be the best guy to answer as my rep indicates but I will answer anyway :)

Why is this happening?

Because your site is on the main page of Ubuntu.com. What does it say? And if you get stuck Askubuntu! It doesn't say read the docs :)

Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro out there, every time a user finds a silly problem, he comes here (I am no different).

More newbies than experts, this would be the result and more! Experts would get tired of answering questions, they want real good questions, otherwise they won't answer.

(When was the last time you saw Jon skeet or jeff answering questions that have less than 10 votes? Jeff left SE because it's not challenging anymore, this what I believe. Skeet doesn't count, he's a robot :P)

And let me ask you, didn't you ever think about just dumping Ubuntu and trying a more challenging experience like Arch or FreeBSD? Or maybe just different experience like Fedora? If you really love Linux then yes you did :)

What does it mean? You're no longer active on this site, either because you got bored answering low quality questions or because you decided to try another distro.

What we can do to improve that?

Declare martial law like they do on Arch forums, don't answer newbies unless they read 200 wiki pages :) Maybe even close them. That's how SO does it. SO isn't doing much better than this site, it's just that they close so many questions

(and I hate them for that, but if you think about it, it's the only way to deal with so much questions, or maybe hire 2 more Jon skeets or Castro :D)

I do not have any other solution, this solution is effective, newbie questions should not end up here in the first place, ubuntuforums.com is the right place for those questions (I am a newbie too).

And there's another issue, that I wanted to discuss on meta.SE but they'll vote it down anyway, you see SE is becoming huge, really huge. Too many sites, for example, you'd prefer to answer Ubuntu questions on superuser or serverfault or unix.SE or here, you can't maintain a community that huge, some sites will be less active than others, it's inevitable.

Note

If Ubuntu becomes a rolling release, (it's being discussed) then there will be far less questions, because there will be 1 version, and you wouldn't see an issue on 12.04 or 13.x, one version for everyone, similar issues for everyone, and I hope it would be more stable like Manjaro not Arch.

Another thing are the questions related to driver support, on superuser you don't see that many questions related to drivers because Microsoft somehow supports so many hardware out of the box, if ubuntu can do that, then the number of asked questions would be so much less than today.

Answer 2

Long-time listener, first time answerer .... (ubuntu user for a long time too).

I'm a regular on the CodeReview site and we are still in Beta, but are trying to get promoted. We had a "beta review" last November that identified a number of issues stalling this promotion.

One of the items identified as an issue is the number of unanswered questions that was accumulating in CodeReview ....

As a community we started a "Call to duty", and responded to the situation. A second event that happened is that recently the StackExchange DataExplorer was updated to include details from Beta sites. As a community we (the CodeReview folk) have been comparing ourselves to graduated sites, and measuring our progress (and hopefully raising awareness with SE Community Leaders).

Today I pulled up the data on AskUbuntu, and was somewhat surprised to say the least....!!!

We have coined the term 'Zombie' to mean "an old question that has no answers", and we have been in the process of 'shooting' those zombies with quality (thus up-voted) answers, or, if the questions are off-topic, they are being closed.

This is a long winded way of me introducing this chart here which shows the changes in nature of your zombie population that has happened over the past 3 years (or so ... 150 weeks):

The blue line with the steep curve is the number of unanswered questions (question was older than 72 hours, and had not been answered) at the date given on the X axis. To make the scales work, that data is presented as 10's of zombies so you should multiply the Y-axis by 10 to match your current statistics of 28K unanswered.

( ... by the way, for some reason you have some odd answers in the system that are much, much older than the questions, and that is why there are negative numbers in the early charts..... )

It is apparent that your zombie problem is escalating, and you need to deal with it.

By comparison, the CodeReview chart looks like:

and you can see that we are proud to have started making a significant dent in our zombie population.

In the process of pushing for the site promotion, we have developed some other charts which you may find interesting. This one is a measure of the site activity, and it is clear where the different Ubuntu releases happened ;-) , and it is clear how those influxes of activity impacted your zombie-stats too :

Answer 3

It would be nice to give us more overall close votes as a community:

It is pretty easy to find things that should be closed, here's one off the top of my head that results in 17 pages of crap we can close:

• https://askubuntu.com/search?q=crash+closed%3Ano+answers%3A0
• https://askubuntu.com/search?q=freeze+closed%3Ano+answers%3A0 (here's another 14 pages!)

I get 27 close votes a day. After 20 in review, that leaves me with 7 votes I can use to help clean up the site. Seven!

Answer 4

I'll throw my 2 cents here, I think Fisher hit the spot, and the big problem are the new users (most of them, not all):

1. Not much information (logs or other stuff) regarding the problem in hand
2. Explanation of the problem itself is of bad quality
3. Most posts itself are written in bad English
4. New users don't vote answers as correct
5. They don't search before asking

This removes motivation for others users to answer those questions, resulting in a high percentage of unanswered questions.

I use Ubuntu, but I also use Slackware (and used other distros in the past) like so, I've been participating on other helping sites, like linuxquestions or arch forums and such, and they have a different philosophy:

Users should be educated on first searching then asking finally voting

In here, they don't bother searching before, they just ask, and we can see this site has a lot of information already, most of the questions asked, have already a solution and has been asked before.

So, how to lower the unanswered questions?

As a new user joins AU, he should receive a warning or some basic instructions, like:

Search -> Ask -> Vote

1. Search first,
2. Ask only if your question isn't found
3. If answer is given mark the question as answered

When a user doesn't do this, the question should be closed and the reason why is the above instructions.

Answer 5

Riding my same old horse into town, I blame the duplicates policy (Duplicates Policy Incentivizes Clutter Rather Than Canonical).

AU feels more chatroom than Wikipedia as users are encouraged to ask and answer duplicate questions. Potential fixes:

For ASKERS:

1. AU shouldn't allow you to ask a question until you've done some searching.
2. AU should optimize its search engine to make it easier for one-timers to find the right answer rather than writing a duplicate question.

For ANSWERERS:

1. As cleaning up is just as much work as answering questions, AU should reward users with points for spotting duplicates and pointing ASKERS to originals.
2. AU should actively strive for canonical questions and answers by penalizing ANSWERERS who create duplicates rather than edit the original answer toward canon.