# What is the average time it takes before a question is answered?

How long is the average wait time to have a question answered? I know that most people have lives outside of this forum so I know people may not have time to skim through the current unanswered questions.

There are several questions I have seen that have not been answered in several years. This person's question hasn't been answered in 2 1/2 years.

• See Distribution of time to first answer in MathStackExchange? which is a bit dated (December 2013). – user147263 Apr 11 '15 at 3:57
• Here's an unanswered question from February, 2011: math.stackexchange.com/questions/24025/… – Gerry Myerson Apr 11 '15 at 13:11
• Instead of "average", why not ask for "median"? Then it won't be made undefined by unanswered questions. – GEdgar Apr 11 '15 at 13:19
• @Gerry: At least having lots of comments prevents it from automatic deletion. – GEdgar Apr 11 '15 at 13:22
• It seems that the oldest unanswered question is this one: An elegant description for graded-module morphisms with non-zero zero component, from July 2010. – Najib Idrissi Apr 11 '15 at 13:23
• So, according to pizza's link: the median time to answer is 23 minutes. That is as of 2 years ago. And only answered questions are counted. – GEdgar Apr 11 '15 at 13:29
• The distribution of time post is quite antiquated in its information. I want average not median because the median is extremely undescriptive of a set. Ex. 1 (1,1,1,5,10) median is 1 and average is 3.6. quite a diferrence. I have a hard time believe it is 23 minutes. – Aethelred Apr 11 '15 at 17:23
• @Aethelred the average is exactly as undescriptive as the median, for example the set $S=\{1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,10^{132}\}$ has average $(10^{132}+9)/10 \approx 10^{131}$. Having the average and the median is interesting (in particular because you can compare them). – Surb Apr 12 '15 at 10:38
• If at least one question has no answer (ever), then the mean time for answers is infinite. – GEdgar Apr 12 '15 at 13:28