What *exactly* is the unanswered questions stat?

Question

I'm curious as to whether the "unanswered questions" score for beta sites refers to:

1. Questions with zero answers, or
2. Questions with no upvoted or accepted answers.

These are two separate queues in the interface. I'm curious because I've been appointed moderator on a beta site and I'm trying to think of ways users can be encouraged to improve this score.

Obviously getting upvoted/accepted answers is the ideal, but this is less likely to happen with old questions, which is already a disincentive if I say, "Have a look and see what you can do". It would also be pointless to the site's stats if the criteria is #2, unless a parallel effort is made to also upvote answers for such questions.

Answer 1

It refers to questions with no upvoted or accepted answers. Questions in the "unanswered" category can have downvoted answers, deleted answers, answers with no net votes, etc. - but they cannot have upvoted or accepted answers.

On a side note, though, it may be good to draw attention to questions that have either

• An accepted answer with no upvotes, and no other upvoted answers
• Questions with no accepted answer

The latter category is going to be large, so it may not be feasible to focus on it. The former, though is interesting. My philosophy is that questions belong to the community and not just the individual (that's why questions are marked as duplicates), and so questions in the first category should still be in the "unanswered" category. But that's just my opinion. Act as you see fit.