How important is accepting answers for the community?

Question

Considering how the unanswered list says something like, 'Questions without, or with no accepted, answers...' I'm wondering about the importance and significance of accepting answers at all for this community (and others, I suppose.)

There's cases where the accepted answer is overvoted by another... As I posit this question, I see a thread asking what to do when an accepted answer is wrong. I see another where a user asks to be able to accept more than one answer...

The acceptance of an answer is based on the decision of the question-asker. This doesn't seem efficient in the sense that there are varying levels of understanding - a novice may ask a question, then receive an expert, as well as another novice, answer... Surely, the expert answer will be upvoted the most but, the asker may choose to accept the novice answer out of lack of understanding (to pull an example totally out of my ass.)

What's the consequence of having a ton of great answers to a question to which none will be accepted because the user doesn't even recognize the feature?

Finally, would it matter if this feature was removed?

Answer 1

Accepting answers is most relevant when the question is in the style of 'I want a correct solution to this problem'. Clearly it's not perfect even then, as you may get two correct answers that would both help you solve the problem, or two answers that between them give a correct solution.

The ability to accept an answer is less helpful for questions where there's no clear 'correct' answer. We get a lot of these here, and as a result I'd say that the ability to accept answers (and habit of doing so) is less important to this community than some others.

What's the consequence of having a ton of great answers to a question to which none will be accepted because the user doesn't even recognize the feature?

I've not noticed any major adverse consequence of that here.

a novice may ask a question, then receive an expert, as well as another novice, answer... Surely, the expert answer will be upvoted the most but, the asker may choose to accept the novice answer out of lack of understanding

If that's the answer that actually helped the asker more, that's fair enough. Incidentally, the highest-voted answer is often the first half-decent answer, rather than the 'best' or most 'expert' in any way.

Answer 2

If there are a large number of questions without an accepted answer then this SE is not serving its overt purpose: people post questions about a problem they have, other people with expertise post answers, one of those answers helps the OP to solve his/her problem. At one level, the purpose of the site is to connect people with problems with other people who can help solve them. That is why the OP get a special "vote": marking one answer as accepted. I always interpret this as "the answer that worked for the OP" -- this may not be the best, in some sense, answer, it just needs to be the one that worked for the OP.

This information can be useful to other people in the SE's other role of serving as a repository of answerable questions with validated answers. A direct indication of "this actually worked for me" can be more informative than general "many people think that this should work", at least as long as the problem that brought you to the question is close enough to the OP's.

Then there is the psychological manipulation side of it. The recognition and +15 points is a reward for answers that directly address the OP's question as written, instead of well written, informative, generally useful information that may not directly help the OP solve his/her problem (hypothetically at least, I'm imagining that this kind of content may receive a lot of up-votes). This was part of the SE system's design to try to keep the answers focused on the specific questions at hand.

Answer 3

It is not very important whether or not a question has an accepted answer.

As soon as a question has an upvoted answer with a positive score, the system considers the question “answered,” and it will not appear in the unanswered questions list anymore.

What the answer acceptance feature does do is provide the question’s OP with any easy way to provide feedback to us. By accepting an answer, the OP is essentially saying, “I came back to the site, read the answers, and this post answers my question. Thank you! I don’t need any more answers.”

Keep in mind, however, that whether or not the OP accepts an answer, the question lives on for the benefit of others. New answers can be added, old answers can be edited (even the question itself can be edited), voting continues, and others can read the answers and learn something new.

It is nice getting feedback from the OP and knowing that the OP came back, read the answer, and learned something, but even if that doesn’t happen, the site functions just as well.

Answer 4

Finally, would it matter if this feature was removed?

I think it would matter a great deal: The possibility of getting extra points for acceptance makes people strive to post the best answers they can muster.

IMO removing the acceptance incentive would cause significant damage to the quality of the answers posted, and make SE much more like a run-of-the-mill discussion site. "Just post something that sounds OK - maybe I'll get an upvote"...

Answer 5

I have asked a number of questions where I have not accepted an answer because there are two or more answers that if consolidated would be a complete answer but separate are not.

There are other questions I have asked that are fairly old that I think are still waiting for a good answer.

But I try accept answers as often as I can.