Many questions, few accepted answers

Question

The number of questions posted every day on the site is good, but I notice that many of them didn't get any accepted answer.

I would like to know how do you feel about this. My idea is: if you are not satisfied with an answer, you should make this clear using the comments, specifying why it is so. You could request more sources, more precision, less ambiguity...but at the very end of a discussion a question should get an answer, unless it's too difficult for the whole community of users.

Being the situations like this, I fear that the impression given to new users attracted to the site will be: you don't have a good community of users that can produce quality answers. Is it really so? If not, why are there so many unaccepted answers?

Answer 1

We currently have 84 questions, of which

• 29 posted by Kyryakos Kyritsis (0 accepted)
• 20 posted by kiamlaluno (0 accepted)

I'm not pointing fingers, rather just acknowledging the fact that the trend is mostly due to this two users choosing not to accept any answer.

Kyryakos explained here that he's purposely not accepting any answer during the private beta.

I don't know about kiamlaluno, but being an experienced SE user I suspect he's doing this on purpose as well.

I'm not convinced this is the proper way to go, since many questions already received high quality answers, which would deserve to be accepted. Moreover if new users will post better answers in the future, the OP can still decide to mark them as accepted.

Bottom line, I'm not particularly concerned, since it looks like both users know what they are doing and they will probably go ahead and accept the answers in the near future.

Answer 2

If you look at all my accounts on Stack Exchange network, you will see that my acceptance rate is 100% or very close to that.

As I did with English Language Learners, I am accepting answers after a week or two; the only question on ELL for which I didn't accept an answer is the one that still doesn't have a satisfactory answer. (The only answer has a score of zero, with an up-vote and a down-vote.)
By coincidence, a week is the default time a site is left in private beta phase. IMO, it doesn't make sense to accept an answer before the site doesn't go in public beta, and this is for two reasons.

• In private beta, the users who access the site are relatively few; there are few users who can answer the question. Accepting an answer would also cause future users who come with the public beta phase not to bother with those questions with accepted answers; they eventually check the questions without an accepted answer, and see if they can contribute with a better answer.

• Statistics about the site are being used when the site is in public beta phase, not when the site is still in private beta. What eventually is being checked is the type of questions being asked, independently from the fact the questions have accepted answers or not. See Italian.SE to remain in private beta for another week.

The most important step now is asking good questions about Italian, and closing those questions that are not a good fit for the site as we want it; then, we also need to decide what type of site we want. In all this, accepted answers are not a problem, yet.

When the site will go in public beta, users should understand what questions we consider on-topic, and which are considered off-topic. This is the most important thing, since a site where users don't understand which question they can ask is destined to fail because it will fail to attract experts. Nobody will like to participate in a site where 25% of the questions are off-topic; that would mean a high noise ratio, which would cover the interesting questions experts want to answer.