Lack of Accepted Answers

Question

This is my first time participating in a public beta, so I apologize if this question has an obvious answer or if the behavior I mention is the norm.

What I seem to be noticing, as I page through our current questions on ELL, is that we have a good amount of questions, a lot of answers, a lot of votes... But very few accepted answers. Just looking at the most recent 5 pages of questions, I'd say definitely less than 50% of questions have accepted answers. The questions have answers, and votes, but not accepts.

Now, assuming this is not the norm for a public beta (I don't have any past experience to confirm or deny that, but it certainly seems odd to me), is there anything we can do to change this? Voting is a great way to draw attention to good answers, and certainly the accepted answer is not always the best (or even correct). But still, accepted answers are an integral part of SE, and I would expect more of them at this point.

So, thoughts? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill or is this actually a problem, and what can we do about it?

Answer 1

I would like to point out another possible reason: The person who asked does not know which answer is the best.

In case you are asking on stackoverflow it is easy. You ask, get answer, try the code, you solve the problem, BAM, accepted!

Even if you ask some soft question on for example workplaceBETA, it is sometime much easier because you hear the advices, try to do accordingly and in one week you can came back and say, YES it was/ NO it was not helpful.

But here, the people ask because they do not know. And if you do not know, how can you say which answer is right? Of course, I am not saying that it is in all the cases, but I think that this fact makes the issue of Lack of Accepted Answers bigger.

For example, the question Does the question mark mean this is a question?. Maybe anyone who has an opinion on this would be able to mark one answer as accepted. But the person who asked maybe not. There are two answers with high number of up-votes and for a person who does not have an opinion on this, it can be very difficult to say which one deserves to be accepted.

The same for this one. How can the person who asked say what is the best?

Maybe it is easy for you native speakers to say which answers are the best and should be accepted, but for me (not a native speaker obviously) it is not.

Sometimes, in the case one does not know what to mark as the accepted answer, can be helpful to take a look at this discussion about soft questions on Academia Meta.

Answer 2

Yes, you are right, but I have noticed that most of the questions come from new users who, for a number of reasons, probably do not read the FAQ section and do not know about the accepting-an-answer system. Maybe sometimes the OP is satisfied with an answer but does not accept it because they do not know about this. Nevertheless I believe that commenting "you can accept my answer if you like it" could be the right solution.

Yes, given that accepting motivate people to write good answers (or even writing an answer in this context), I am thinking that an automatic message/comment (such as "consider accepting useful answers" with a link to FAQ) on new user's questions might be useful and would not put more charge on moderator's bag of responsibilities, although, alas, we do not have real moderators here yet.

Answer 3

I would add that not immediately accepting an answer could be done intentionally.
It is true that users with few, or zero, experience in Stack Exchange sites don't understand what accepting an answer means, but in my case, I wait accepting answers to let other users partecipate in the question. It is true that some of the questions I asked were asked during the private beta, and in that phase there are less users than during the public beta; still, I think that waiting some days before accepting an answer doesn't hurt.

I find that accepting an answer too quickly could have a negative effect on the site, especially if the accepted answer is never changed, even if a more detailed, or better answer is later written.

Answer 4

If it is a problem, I suspect that it is because users of a site devoted to English learning, written in English, it will be hard to understand all the instructions and get used to all the culture. And so learning how to 'accept' an answer might be a few learning steps away from one learning first how to even ask a question.

But I don't know that it is a problem, so that explanation may be irrelevant. Flag a mod to see if they can calculate the stats for you.

Answer 5

This is a discussion from last year but I would like to bring it to everyone's attention again because I notice the same thing happening now.

Accepting an answer is not mandatory, of course, but it means that I asked a question and I received an answer which made things clear to me. The accepted answer can be the one that helped the most.

For new users it is possible not to have noticed this option. However, there is a number of users at the moment who have asked a large number of questions and accepted none or just a few. In the past few weeks I have written a few comments to questions of such users, mentioning that and linking to the help section. Nothing changed. What does this mean? None of the answers have ever been helpful? They never read the answers to their own questions? But then, why keep asking?

Of course, it is a good idea not to accept an answer immediately; this way others will have more time to think about the question before answering. However, not accepting any answers consistently for months does not seem right.