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 :
