(For Abandoned Questions)
The Unanswered questions listings are a great place to find questions with some meat on their bones that take some time, thought, research and self-learning to answer, but the quantity of questions that build up which actually do have an answer makes finding those fun gems not so fun to find.
Sure, we have advanced search syntax, data.stackexchange queries and filtered questions but none of these stop the build up of abandoned and answered but unaccepted questions.
In the blog post Why Can’t I Accept My Own Answer? Jeff Atwood gives a great explanation of the spirit of accepting answers. Two pertinent quotes from that posting are...
... The default sort order is “votes” for a reason. Normally, the best answer will automatically float to the top through community voting. This is important because we expect a lot of our question askers to be drive-bys, programmers who ask a single question, get the answer they need (or don’t), and are never seen again. ...
... Asking a question is an opportunity to connect with and learn from your peers. That’s what accepted answer is for. It’s completely optional, because if it wasn’t, the system would be in a perpetual state of broken. But in my experience, it’s one of those little details that separates good programmers from great programmers: great programmers enjoy and even seek out ways to acknowledge the skills and experience of their peers. ...
Should the members of the community wishing to "pay-it-forward" by actively searching out questions to answer have to wade through those seemingly abandoned questions simply because the asker is part of the afore mentioned group and doesn't have that spirit in mind?
This type of proposal was brought up on meta.superuser and declined "...under the premise that the question with the most upvotes is effectively the community-accepted answer." The premise seems inline with the sprit Jeff mentions but doing nothing just leaves those questions building up in the unanswered queues.
What if when a question met certain criteria those individuals with requisite qualifications could elect a 'community accepted' answer thereby marking the question as answered and removing it from the queue without any negative side-effect to the asker?
What would the criteria be? Perhaps, similar to how duplicates are handled...
Working directly off of What is a “closed” or “on hold” question?
When an answer is imposed, additional answers may still be posted, the question and existing answers can still be edited (by users with edit privileges or by suggested edit) and voted upon, and will continue to count for badges. The asker of a question receives no reputation change when an answer is imposed and no additional reputation points are given to the answerer that provided the imposed answer.
Imposed answers can be over-ridden or confirmed by the asker accepting an answer (including the imposed one) and in doing so reputation is awarded as normal to the asker and answerer.
- Users with at least 3,000 (500 on Beta sites) in one of the questions tags may vote to impose any answer (see limits below)
- Moderators may vote (regardless of their reputation)
- Users can also retract/cancel their close vote by clicking the impose button again and clicking the "Retract Vote" button (you can't cast impose votes again on that question).
- Each user with vote to impose privileges gets 24 votes to impose per day (50 on Stack Overflow)
- 5 votes are required to impose
- Votes will expire after 4 days if the answer does not reach 5 votes
- You can only vote to impose once per question
When imposing an answer, no reason need be provided for the action. The question body must be unchanged for a period of at least 60 days and the asker must not have commented on any of the answers for 45 days.