What should we do with our unanswered questions?

Question

Although our percentage of questions answered is good, we've been around long enough now to have built up quite a few unanswered questions.

What can we do to improve this? Some may be answerable, and perhaps have just slipped off the front page and been forgotten until now. Others may lack answers because they are not a good fit for the site - do any of the unanswered questions need to be closed?

Are there any unanswered questions that need further clarification or additional detail before they can be answered? If comments requesting this have been ignored, should those questions be ignored, closed, answered hypothetically based on incomplete information?

It is perfectly possible to have good questions with complete information that simply don't get answered since none of us know how to, but I suspect most of our unanswered questions do not fall into this category.

I'm going to start looking back at old unanswered questions myself, so this post is both to encourage others to do the same, and also to seek discussion on general approaches to doing this.

Answer 1

We need more people to answer questions. Lets see, currently top three users and answer writers are:

• Nathan Reed, 63 answers (~12%)
• Me, 52 (~10%)
• John Calsbeek, 23 (4%)

This means more that quite close to one quarter of all answers is made by 3 persons. And about 10 persons with close to each 1-2%. We need you guys. It doesn't matter if the answer is always stellar, something that paves the way to an answer is also acceptable. Answering grows your knowledge.

There are still some quite basic questions that haven't been answered, but you could also write alternate answers to questions that already exist and are weak.

PS: I'm currently holding a bit back so that not all the easy answers get taken.