Timeline for Does the number of answers really drop over years?
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| Apr 13, 2020 at 18:47 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 13, 2020 at 16:09 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 13, 2020 at 14:26 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | @WillSawin That query indeed looks suspicious - I have edited it a bit to calculate the ratio in a different way. (Certainly, it is expected that this ratio is lower if we remove these two tags.) I'll try to check the queries again a bit later. I will repeat the explanation which I gave in the post - in the queries based on tags I am looking at the creation date of the question. (So the answer posted in April can contribute to number in the previous months, it is posted on an older question.) | |
| Apr 13, 2020 at 13:54 | comment | added | Will Sawin | With big list and soft question excluded the answers to recent question ratio is 1.26. With them included it's .70. Doesn't this imply that at least 1 -.7/1.26 = 44% of recent questions are soft questions or big lists? | |
| Apr 13, 2020 at 13:29 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 13, 2020 at 13:23 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 13, 2020 at 12:42 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 13, 2020 at 12:36 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 13, 2020 at 12:30 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 13, 2020 at 12:24 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 13, 2020 at 12:18 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 13, 2020 at 12:13 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 13, 2020 at 12:07 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 13, 2020 at 6:01 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 11, 2020 at 14:23 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 11, 2020 at 9:42 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 11, 2020 at 6:30 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 11, 2020 at 5:15 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 10, 2020 at 15:50 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | Since we're talking about unanswered questions, I will stress that those numbers show questions which do not have answer now. If we looked at the total number of unanswered questions at a given time, that is most likely going to be increasing. At least it seems be the case for Mathematics Stack Exchange where those numbers are tracked. (With the exception of occasional drops caused by clean-up scripts.) | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 15:14 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | @JosephO'Rourke Just to clarify, it is number of questions which were posted in a given month. Assuming that I did not make mistake when creating the queries, those number say that 403 out of the questions posted in March 2017 are still without an answer, 291 of the questions posted in April 2017 are still without an answer. (So these stats concern two disjoint sets of questions, one for every month.) | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 15:05 | comment | added | Joseph O'Rourke | Concerning your plots of unanswered questions (thanks!): How can the # of unanswered questions drop by ~100 in one month? E.g., from 403 to 291 around Apr 2017? Surely that many were not suddenly answered. | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 14:55 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 10, 2020 at 14:25 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | Have to agree. Still, I find it highly significant if the number of answers per view indeed grows. | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 14:19 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | @მამუკაჯიბლაძე Re: So it might well be ... drop of the number of views? This is hard to say. One would expect that question gets some views from the frontpage, some views from Google searches and various external sources. While the first category contributes to views mostly soon after the posting, the contribution of the second category should be more-or-less steady. So it is expected that older posts have more views. | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 14:12 | vote | accept | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | ||
| Apr 10, 2020 at 14:12 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | I am going to accept this one. Although this is not really an answer, it amply provides what the question requests - additional information to contemplate. | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 14:05 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | Another thing that is, I believe, very important and that I noticed only now. The number of views per question seems to drop even more noticeably than the number of answers; and moreover number of answers per view actually seems to grow! So it might well be that the actual reason behind the drop of the number of answers is the drop of the number of views? | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 13:25 | comment | added | Martin Sleziak | @JosephO'Rourke I have added the queries showing number and percentage of questions with zero answers. (I counted the question with no answers, although the phrase unanswered question is also used in different meanings.) | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 13:24 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 10, 2020 at 13:00 | comment | added | Joseph O'Rourke | @მამუკაჯიბლაძე. So it might be interesting to see the growth of the number of unanswered questions over time, to judge if that is sufficient to explain the drop in the A/Q ratio. | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 12:40 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 10, 2020 at 12:35 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 10, 2020 at 11:52 | comment | added | მამუკა ჯიბლაძე | Thanks a lot for your work. Although not giving anything definitive, your answer made me think of the following: if we only know that the number of questions remains roughly the same, I believe this almost necessarily implies that the number of answers must drop. This is because each question needs certain time to be answered, so the number of unanswered questions must accumulate over time. This is most clearly shown in your graph for the ratio answers/questions | |
| Apr 10, 2020 at 11:27 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 10, 2020 at 11:13 | history | edited | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 10, 2020 at 10:47 | history | answered | Martin Sleziak | CC BY-SA 4.0 |