Most wanted hitlist of unanswered questions?

Question

Since we want to bring our answer rate up, and we have a great many good questions that could really do with an answer; it occurred to me that we could pro-actively single out a particularly promising selection of questions each week/month/quarter and get them answered by any means:

• Adding a bounty
• Contacting specialists in the area (MVP's etc.) to see if they'd be willing to provide an answer
• Researching and providing the answer ourselves and/or encouraging the community to do so

It would help our rates slightly, and possibly kick up a some more interest from potential answerers. Admittedly it would be a bit high-maintenance, but it may be worth it.

Would this be worthwhile?

Answer 1

Contacting specialists and encouraging the community to get involved would really help. As mentioned by @KitMenke, making this a chat event should get us the attention needed and have the benefit of both promoting chat and the site as a whole as well!

Some ideas for hitlist criteria:

• older question but with a decent number of upvotes
• new in the last month with at least one upvote
• question from a new user that's active in the site
• question from a high voter in the last month
• ... please edit this post if you have other ideas ...

All questions must be of a high quality and have an element of challenge or interest to them.

We can advertise a banner on the site a week prior, as well as on Twitter and other social networks.

The event could run by introducing the questions up front so people can pick and choose what's most interesting to them. Probably a maximum of five questions (maybe start off with three?) but we'd need to play it by ear. To conclude we can remind people to vote and help out with our unanswered list until the next event! Perhaps we would run them every month.

Answer 2

I periodically try to answer a few unanswerred questions for this reason. Apparently a queston counts as aswerred if it has at least one answer with at least one upvote. It might be worth trawling through the unanswerred (but not zero answers) questions and identifying answers that are good (i.e. helpful, not necessarily perfect) but nobody upvoted. A few of my answers, ahem, fall into that category.

Answer 3

I like the idea of allowing users to put out bounties on other people's questions to help this out. This may make things more worthwhile to research and answer. A few caveats to this:

1) Multiple users can put out bounties on a question, however should anyone who has put out a bounty answer the question as well, they are prohibited themselves from collecting on the bounty, they can still answer the question though, and if they are marked as the answer the bounty points outstanding disappear to the eternal void.

2) Only the original person who asked a question can still mark an answer and award the combined bounty, no matter what.

3) A certain amount of reputation should be earned before you can put out a bounty on other people's questions (say 1,000 rep). This will allow for a "master presence" effect drawing more experts to the question.

EDIT: Another idea, how about allowing "abandoned" questions to be answered by the community, in the case of where the person who asked the question never shows up again? Or I'd set it up something like this:

If the question is unanswered, AND it's been 3 months since the person who originally asked the question has visited the question then open the answers up to a community vote. As soon as 10 people vote an answer as "the answer" that question is given the "answer" award, and all the requisite reputation, bounties in effect, etc. Now then, we put a little at stake for the voters to ensure their honesty and that they've researched it. For every upvote obtained on the answer AFTER asking, the voters gain 10 reputation apiece, however for every downvote obtained on the answer after asking, the voters lose 5 reputation apiece. The voters who marked as the answer are confidential to remove bias in this.