The second stage of our clean-up contest is to go through the unanswered questions.
Background
Questions are considered unanswered if there is no accepted answer or if there are no upvoted answers. Our goal is to reduce the number of unanswered questions by taking several actions.
Currently there are a total of 384 unanswered questions, with 198 of those having no answers. Some of these unanswered questions will be off-topic or low quality questions that should be closed. Others will be good questions that have been missed somehow. And others will be good questions that require an expertise we’re currently lacking on the site.
Procedure
You do not have to act on all 384 unanswered questions; only what you feel comfortable with.
Go through the list of unanswered questions at your leisure, and perform any of the following actions:
- Answer the questions you can answer.
- Upvote good answers. Please don’t go crazy upvoting stuff you normally wouldn’t. Stick to only upvoting good posts.
- If it’s a good question, and you know someone outside of the community that has the expertise to answer the question, share it. For example, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
- Edit those questions that can be improved.
- If a question is unclear, leave a comment asking for clarification.
- If the question is off-topic or otherwise not a good fit for the site, vote to close and/or downvote. And leave a comment if you feel inclined to do so.
- Vote to delete some questions.*
*Questions that have been around for a while with no answers are candidates for deletion, even if it’s not a terrible question. And obviously really bad threads should also be deleted.
For those questions you feel should be closed or deleted, leave a link to them in the answer below under the appropriate category. The reason for doing so is that we have 384 unanswered questions, and the odds of everyone going through all 384 questions is close to zero. By leaving the links below it makes it easier for people to find these questions.
Doing it this way also opens up the contest to more people. Note that you need 4000 rep to have the ability to vote to delete. If you have less than 4000 rep and spot a question that you think should be deleted, leave a note in the answer below next to the question’s link.
Final Points
We are not looking to end phase 2 with 0 unanswered questions; we simply want to reduce the number of unanswered questions. The most important aspect is to answer good questions that have been missed, and close and delete the really bad questions.
This phase will last 1 week, starting today and ending on January 29. On January 30 we will move on to phase 3.
Let me know if you have any questions.
