Why is 80% questions without any answer?

[duka.milan]

Why is 80% questions without any answer? Jaspermans of the world unite!

[nash.seq]

Well after having a cursory look at this site for the past week, a lot of them aren't well formed, see: http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask.

Basically, I see some questions from people without any context of the problem. What are you trying to do? What steps have you taken (no a stack trace of your error is not self-explanatory). Is your question already easily answered in another source (e.g. SO, user guides). Is what you're typing even English? Some don't even ask a question and just post a log dump! Speaking for myself ofcourse, but I just get put off when people ask questions without showing even a little effort.

[djohnson53]

What Nash said is part of it.  Staff participation ebbs and flows as their workload varies during release cycles.
We all try to help.  There is a docs section and a search box.  80% is a little rough.

An average opensource community can hope to hit 65% response rate. I say response, because of Nash's point.

Sometimes all you can say is "What?"

But, as a community grows, paid staff can't keep up. Community members have to step up.

It's like helping your colleage that sits next to you in the office.  You can't do their job for them, but you want to help point them in the right direction and mentor and coach them to an answer.

We have some real heros out there in the community. But they have jobs too.

We're trying our best and hope to get better.