# Statistics for mse: visitors before the first answer and answer rate per tag

I am interested in some statistical information about the math.stackexchange website. Especially these two:

What is the average number of visitors of a question before it receives the first answer?

What are the average answer rates per Tag?

• Data Explorer might be useful for stuff like this, for example this query. But I doubt it is possible to find statistics about number of views before the first answer. – Martin Sleziak Mar 24 '13 at 18:19
• @MartinSleziak interesting. thanks for the comment. – Seyhmus Güngören Mar 25 '13 at 16:30
• You can see answer rates per tag by going to the tag page, and looking for the "top users" link; for example, the calculus tag has an answer rate of about 90%. – user61527 Jun 13 '14 at 19:07

Stack Exchange does not store views with timestamps; each new view simply increments the view counter. (The way that views are measured excludes frequent reloads by the same user.) However, you can find the distribution of time before first answer.

The answer rate by tag can be found here; although the data is from last year, the pattern has not changed much. The query used there takes the SE definition of answered as "has an answer that is either accepted or has positive score".

My observations suggest that on this site, the majority of questions with only a zero-score answer are in fact satisfactorily answered. So I forked the query and obtained the number of questions by tag, with (blue) and without (red) answers below:

There are 10 tags in which more than 20% of questions have no answer:

1. $26.8\%$
2. $25.08\%$
3. $24.82\%$
4. $24.65\%$
5. $23.27\%$
6. $22.9\%$
7. $22.82\%$
8. $20.93\%$
9. $20.58\%$
10. $20.4\%$
• The top two lines suggest that askers of such questions are insufficiently aware of Computational Science – user147263 Jun 14 '14 at 4:23