Unanswered questions guidelines proposal

Question

The number of unanswered questions is growing steadily. I think it's time we came up with a plan to deal with this.

Here are my personal thoughts on it:

Why deal with this at all?

Because some unanswered questions are difficult but interesting (at least to some people), some are irrelevant, some are really already answered in the comments but so simple that no one has posted an answer ...

The point is to make the important ones a bit more visible, and get rid of the rest. This refers to old unanswered questions, not ones posted only a couple of days ago.

How to deal with it?

I have the impression that there are actually lots of questions that are not so difficult to answer, but it's a lot of work to implement the solution. Many have good enough answers in the comments already, but people here tend not to post in the answer format when they didn't work out the full solution and don't have code for it. Sometimes this is really simple to write up the code, but it's also boring and not worth anyone's (but the OPs) time. I think often (but not always) it's enough to just give enough information to solve the problem. It's not necessary to write all the code for the OP... When someone already made a comment which practically answers the questions but doesn't have the code, why not just re-post the comment as a community wiki answer?

Similarly, when the answer to a question is "this is a bug", it's better to get the question out of the unanswered list by posting a community wiki answer.

How to organize dealing with it

Once we come up with a few guidelines on how to deal with various types of questions, we could organise bi-monthly cleanup days/weekends.

I think what we need to significantly reduce the unanswered count is to set some guidelines on how to deal with certain kinds of old unanswered questions, and make these guidelines "official". Then people won't be afraid that they'd break some unwritten etiquette rule when thinking of posting a very simple answer.

I'm going to post a set of proposed guidelines as a community wiki answer below (so everyone can edit it). Please edit it or post alternative suggestions as another answer. The aim is to end up with a set of guidelines everyone agrees upon.

Answer 1

Official (not yet) guidelines on handling unanswered questions

These apply to unanswered questions that are at least one week old and do not have any new activity. These guidelines are mainly meant for community organized cleanups for easy to deal with questions.

Please also consider if the OP is still active on the site and responsive. If you're in doubt, ask the OP about a possible solution in a comment.

1. Bugs If the problem has been confirmed as a bug in the comments, and the OP is not waiting for workaround answers, just post "This has been confirmed as a bug" as a community wiki answer.

2. Simple idea, but laborious implementation If there are comments which make it very clear how to solve the problem, and the implementation is straightforward but laborious, post an edited version of the comments as a community wiki answer.

3. Complete answer code already in comments Just transfer the code and any accompanying explanation to a community wiki answer. Add some explanation if the comment didn't include any.

Answer 2

To add to the discussion:

If anyone feels like spending 15 minutes to look at unanswered questions, here's a small program that will give you 5 random ones:

items = {};
page = 1;
While[True,
  result = 
    Import["https://api.stackexchange.com/2.1/questions/unanswered?page=" <> 
     IntegerString[page] <> 
     "&order=desc&sort=creation&site=mathematica", "JSON"];
  items = Join[items, "items" /. result];
  If[Not["has_more" /. result], Break[]];
  page++;
]  (* if you run this too many times, it'll burn up your API quota *)

With[{questions = RandomSample[items, 5]},
  Column[Hyperlink["title", "link"] /. questions]]

Take a look at them, upvote if you want to know the answer yourself, answer if you can answer, or deal with them in the way described above if appropriate.

Answer 3

I picked an unanswered question I thought would be an easy case. It qualifies as category 3. I hope there will be some feedback here. I would like to know if what I did constitutes a satisfactory resolution of the no-answer issue for the particular question I worked on. Here is the link.

Easy as it was, writing up the answer still took a fair amount of time. My experience leaves me with the impression that carrying out the full program proposed here will be a long and arduous project.

Update

Well, I got feedback almost immediately and no less than from Mike Honeychurch the question's poster. He pointed out that I had misunderstood the question and had picked the wrong comment to transcribe as an answer. I felt there was nothing for me to do but delete my failed attempt to supply an answer.

I conclude from this experiment that difficult as I thought this proposed project would be, it is far more difficult than I first imagined. My conclusion may only apply to me. Others, who have a better understanding, may get better milage, but I will be very reluctant to participate further.

It wasn't all loss, though. I provoked Honeychurch into posting his own answer, so at least the question is off the unanswered list.

2nd Update

I think it would be better if the community made this kind of intervention unnecessary. People simply should stop writing answers in the comments to the question. They should, rather, put a little more time and effort in and post a real answer. Such answers may be on brief side but they better than leaving the question in the unanswered state.