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Went to Area 51 and saw that the only thing that "Needs Work" on Economics StackExchange is the portion of questions answered.

As of now, there are 2,136 questions that are "unanswered." Of these, 359 questions are actually answered, but the question asker didn't accept any answer. Using the current one, we'd have around 76% of questions answered. But if we count the questions that are answered but none are accepted, we'd have 80% of questions answered.

Indeed, the quality of the answer might not be up to the asker's expectation. But I'm quite sure there are instances where the asker gets the helpful response, but is new to StackExchange and so didn't realize the importance of accepting an answer.

Is there a way to encourage/remind new users to accept an answer, if there's one?

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  • $\begingroup$ One can of course leave a comment politely inquiring if they are willing to accept and if not why. I guess this only works for recent questions though $\endgroup$
    – Maarten Punt
    Dec 17, 2019 at 18:00
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    $\begingroup$ Would it be useful to let the community vote to accept if no answer is accepted by the OP within 6 months or something? $\endgroup$
    – Art
    Dec 18, 2019 at 2:35

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Those Area 51 stats are no longer relevant to whether a site reaches graduation or not.

The rules have changed. But Area 51 is old legacy code, and so it just doesn't get updated.

Now, it's all about the average number of questions asked per day - and that needs to sustain at a number much higher than it is, presently.

On the whole, don't worry about answer acceptance. The voting should be bringing the best answer to the top anyway.

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    $\begingroup$ +1. Regarding the last sentence though, while true, we also have a notorious lack of voting problem. $\endgroup$
    – BB King
    Dec 30, 2019 at 0:39
  • $\begingroup$ +1 Not to mention the fact that we have a lot of questions with no or a single answer anyway, so order doesn't matter in that sense $\endgroup$
    – Maarten Punt
    Jan 21, 2020 at 11:11
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As far as I understand, this concern about Area 51 was the reason for what I came across today. An anonymous participant of this forum with the name Giskard said that he did not understand the meaning of the word “experiment” in my question, then reproached me for not accepting the answers to my previous questions, from which he apparently concluded that communication with me was "fruitless", and then he disappeared. I flagged two of his comments as unfriendly (one of them disappeared immediately after that), but his motives remained unclear for me. Continuing the comment by ​​BBKing in this thread, I would add that you also have a notorious lack of politeness problem.

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