Can we increase answer acceptance rate?

Question

While I think MageStackDay is a great idea, wouldn't it be nice to see a greater percentage of answers accepted which would I think have the knock on effect of encouraging people to answer more questions?

We don't obviously want answers just for the sake of it, content should remain good, but looking through the most recent 7 pages of questions (so 105 questions) 44 of the questions have answers, but only 11 have been accepted by the OP even though in many cases an answer is obviously correct and the OP has even confirmed this by adding a comment saying so, but still has not accepted.

This in turn means 61 questions don't even have answers. This isn't great stats - rather sounds like a losing battle unless questions are realistically answerable and the incentive is there to post answers by knowing there is a good chance that one of the answers to the question is likely, rather than unlikely to be accepted.

Part of the problem may be that many questions are posted - and more increasingly it appears, that just can't easily be answered either because they are just aren't clear, are very store specific or just don't have enough information to allow them to be answered.

While a good majority of users attempt to post well thought out and complete answers, the same unfortunately doesn't often appear to be true for users posting questions which can be sloppy and lacking important information.

Don't ask me how to do it, but the solution appears to lie with those users who more ask than answer questions. If we can somehow encourage these users to ask good quality, information rich questions and then accept answers as correct much more readily than they currently do, this would both increase the sites profile as a source for genuinely useful Magento information because of the high quality of the questions, but also provide an incentive for those questions to be answered because of the increased likely hood of an answer being accepted (not to mention more complete questions are answered more readily anyway with less need for clarification). This is probably particularly the case with new users who are not an active part of the community often coming on just to ask their question with little other involvement afterwards.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

All of the topics in your question have been asked and discussed before:
- The quality of MageOverflow
- Is it bad form to prompt people to mark answers as accepted? (During BETA)
- Nagging for upvotes
- How to manage new users?
- Let's promote a Healthy(-ier) Beta

There are also threads about this on the "Mother Ship" meta website:
- Force Accepted Answers on Questions by Inactive Users
- Suggest Stack Overflow users with zero accept rates to accept some answers
- and others...

The conclusion seams to be that StackExchange sites are community driven websites.
You can nudge from time to time new users to accept answers that solved their problems, but until SE will have an auto-acceptance feature there is nothing much we can do.

If the user does not want/care to accept an answer there is nothing much we can do.

As for the unclear questions, flag / vote to close them.

The best thing I see so far is the MageStackDay Initiative that, based on the stats from the first edition did a good job.
The stats are even better, because the MageStackDay Spirit lived on for a few more weeks after the main event. You can see here that on 2014-12-09 we got to an answer rate of 73.52. Then the holidays came and everyone started drinking.
Let's get the as many people involved as possible for MageStackDay Reloaded maybe we can do an even better job this time.