Internal process of handling unanswered questions in different Stack Exchange sites

Question

I looked at Parenting Stack Exchange and Math Stack Exchange's unanswered page, and one thing that stood out to me is that Parenting SE had only 7 questions, all within the past 2 weeks, but Math SE has nearly 173,000 unanswered questions (at the time of posting).

Do different SE's have different processes internally for marking questions as unanswered?

From what I understand, Parenting SE is a much more tight-knit community with fewer posts per day, but Math SE is much bigger with many more questions asked, and their unanswered questions can be both posted recently or a few years ago.

This might be a bit of a technical question, but thanks for taking the time to read my question. Please also explain in layman's terms, because I am a beginner at programming in general.

Answer 1

There's no magical process - what you see is really what you get. I suppose it's just a matter of what sort of subject matter experts you need to answer a question.

The criteria are broadly the same - they are questions with no upvoted or accepted answers and it should quite literally say so when you select the appropriate tab.

Parenting.SE is a newer site than Math.SE (so fewer overall questions).

"Traffic" works both ways - questions are more likely to be spotted by people who're trawling the front pages, but questions can also slip off it. Some users search by tag (particularly on SO).

And well, at least in theory, there are more possible answers for a "soft" subject than a technical one. I wouldn't say parenting is any easier than math, but there are more potentially 'correct' answers there.

So, you're looking at two different sites, with very different 'styles' of questions, and communities, with different groups of people capable of answering said questions. They aren't really comparable off raw numbers at all.

Answer 2

It's mostly the difference of site subjects. In parenting, everyone is an expert; everyone knows exactly how to raise someone else's children. In math, one needs to have more than an opinion in order to answer a question.

Answer 3

Some sites specifically work at getting unanswered questions answered. Here's an example from Travel Meta. Others don't mind whether questions are marked as answered or not. Some sites have a culture of upvoting and accepting (the unanswered tab actually shows questions without upvoted answers) and some have less of that. Some sites remove questions that can't be answered and some let them hang around in the belief that they will get answers eventually when the right person comes to the site.

So what you observe is a combination of the subject matter (whether the question even can be answered), the closing/downvoting/deleting strategy (do questions that cannot be answered get deleted), the answering habits of the populace (travel folks go do google searches, ask on twitter, and perform real research in order to answer someone's unanswered question), and the upvoting and accepting habits (a good answer may sit at zero votes, keeping the question on the unanswered tab). It's not surprising that sites diverge as a result.

Is it a problem? I don't think so. I never use the "unanswered" tab or decide which questions on the main page I will read based on whether they have answers or not. I don't find it a particularly important statistic. Do you?