Unless I screwed up this query somehow, there are a lot of missing check marks here.
Is this normal for SE these days? If not, why is the Writing site different? I tried this query on a handful of other sites and saw more "missing checkmarks" than I expected. English and Worldbuilding have the same issue, maybe for similar reasons?
Other sites like Space Exploration and Code Review are closer to one third unaccepted. These are just randomly selected examples, not sure how to run this query against every site on the network.
Anyway, what gives? Some of these questions have tons of good answers, but without the checkmark I'm unsure how they should be handled. Answer them if I haven't already? Try to make my answer more persuasive if I've already answered? Or just assume OP isn't gonna accept one no matter what?
There's an interesting paper here on unresolved questions at Stack Overflow. It concludes with the following sentence:
Since the unresolved questions are less helpful for problem solving and are increasing rapidly, our models can assist in automatically identifying them for necessary quality management.
Some might argue that unresolved questions are not a problem on Writing or other sites on the network as they are on Stack Overflow, because the material is more subjective. But I would argue to the contrary: because the material is more subjective, it is even more important to know which answer was the most acceptable to the author of each question. Because of the subjective nature of both the questions and the answers, it is much more difficult to tell if asker and answerers of unresolved questions are all on the same page.
On Stack Overflow, anyone finding an unresolved question that they need an answer to can independently verify whether an existing answer addresses the question in an acceptable way in a matter of minutes, with minimal effort. On Writing, it could take months. This suggests that proper resolutions to questions are much more valuable here.