Joseph Wright suggested in chat that we arrange to meet regularly in chat to discuss unanswered questions. He said:
How does this idea sound: we agree a regular (once a month) slot to discuss unanswered questions here on chat? Something like "First Wednesday in the month, 1900-2100 GMT is the 'unanswered question' session on chat"
How does this sound?
A place to note down how this would work.
Cycle of three time slots:
The moderator-adjustable banner would be set ~48 h before to state that a 'unanswered question session' was scheduled on chat.
At the start of the session, someone (first person involved?) would pick some pages from the unanswered list: "This month, let's focus on pages 4, 15 and 20 from the unanswered list." Alternatively, we could pick some of the tags from the unanswered list: "Let's look at all of the {macro} questions that need answering."
Participants can then discuss questions that might want closing, etc., quickly without the questions being forgotten.
More experienced users might then set (small) bounties on questions which seem answerable but for which no quick fix turns up.
I wasn't able to make the first session (and will be unlikely to make others if they are to be held on Sundays), but I think that there's still a way to enable people like myself to be part of the process.
One part of the "dealing with unanswered questions" process is sifting out the "should be closed" questions from those worth spending some time on. This is something that is easier in a crowd: by myself, I might worry that I'd misunderstood the question, but if I can check and ask people in real-time, then I'd be more confident. What little I saw of the activity suggested that there was a fair bit of this going on in the session.
To help those, like myself, who weren't there, maybe a "summary sheet" could be published of those questions that were considered with a "status": "closed" and "answered" being two of the obvious ones, and "probably should be closed" or "looks like it might be interesting" being also useful (though snappier wording could be chosen!).
I'd also recommend that those who were there reflect a bit on which bits worked and which didn't. Speaking from my vast experience (ie none), I'd conjecture that the process didn't actually speed up the answering of questions, but that it was most effective in sorting out those questions that should be answered, and in getting answers validated. If I'm right, then a couple of modifications could be in order: a list of those questions to be considered could be published beforehand (as Joseph suggests) so that people can have a glance through first, and (as I suggest) a list of "things done" published afterwards so that others can look through and vote accordingly.
Anyway, well done to those that took part, and I hope that this continues!
The first Unanswered Questions Chat was held August 7. We started out with 252 unanswered questions, and ended up with approximately 223 by the time people quit.
All in all, I would say it was a success.
Thanks to everyone who helped.
Sunday, 2nd October 2011, we had another "Answer the Unanswered" session, 21:00--23:00 GMT.
When we started, there were 192 unanswered questions (meaning without upvoted answers), after the session there were 157 left. Some were answered, some were closed after discussion, usually with a comment to the question. For example, we noticed some very localized old questions with insufficient information.
Now: 148, which means currently 1.56% of all non-closed questions are unanswered.
