up vote 12 down vote favorite
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This may not even be a concern with the users, and there's probably a valid reason, but the answer ratio on GIS is kinda low (84%) compared to other Stack sites with similar traffic (but not that much lower). As of this posting, 2,082 questions on GIS have no upvoted answers. Being inexperienced with the GIS community both here and at large, I'd like to know if this seems normal. Are these questions bad questions with bad answers? Are they about obsolete software?

From my experience working with Stack Exchange, we tend to see this as a problem; it'd be easy to assume from the number that a lot of users come here, ask a question, and don't get a decent answer (or an answer at all). I do understand that that most likely does not apply for GIS. I just want to know if you, the loyal users, think the low answer ratio is a problem to be fixed! And truthfully, from my perspective this is a very healthy site, and this low-ish answer ratio is the one area of improvement.

If you want to help lower the number of unanswered questions:

I would like to see if we can get GIS's answer percentage up to 90% over the next month. Looking at the questions in the links above and giving them the once over is a good place to start.

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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. – whuber♦ Nov 6 '12 at 17:16

4 Answers

up vote 15 down vote

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? – Brett White Nov 6 '12 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.) – whuber♦ Nov 7 '12 at 17:11
up vote 6 down vote

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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up vote 5 down vote

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. – GIS-Jonathan Nov 12 '12 at 12:24
@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 ;-) – R.K. Dec 19 '12 at 13:06
@R.K. - I can't say I've read the FAQ..... ;-) – GIS-Jonathan Jan 4 at 11:53
up vote 5 down vote

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. – whuber♦ Nov 7 '12 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. – sgrieve Nov 8 '12 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. – R.K. Nov 10 '12 at 14:39
That sounds like a great idea. – sgrieve Nov 10 '12 at 16:58

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