<p>It is worth considering that an <strong>unanswered question</strong> is defined as a question that has no <em>upvoted</em> (or accepted) answers and <em>is not closed</em>.  Also, the <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/users/-1/community">community user</a> 'bumps' one unanswered question per hour to the top of the main page, which provides an opportunity for them to be addressed.  </p>

<p>From these points, I would make a couple of tentative suggestions to any who wish to help lower our unanswered question rate:  When you see an unanswered question bumped by the community user, take a look at it.  </p>

<ol>
<li>Often, these threads have very low views and have answers without any upvotes, perhaps because no one has ever paid any attention to them.  If there are any answers, see if they might merit an upvote (cf., <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1900/7290">CrossValidated's rather extreme up-voting problem</a>).  </li>
<li>Also often, in my opinion, questions are not quite clear enough to really be answerable.  I will typically give the OP the benefit of the doubt in these cases, possibly leaving a comment prompting them to provide needed information.  However, the threads bumped by the community user are all at least one month old.  It is common for a drive-by asker to leave a marginally clear / unclear question, not return to monitor the progress of the thread, and be long gone.  Clicking on the OP's username will take you to their page where you can see if they are an active user and when they last showed up on the site.  You can make a reasonable guess about whether they will return to their question.  A question that may not be quite clear enough to be answered with an OP who will probably never return can be closed as <code>unclear what you're asking</code> (cf., <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1409/7290">Should the standards for closing questions be relaxed somewhat for old questions?</a>).  </li>
</ol>

<p>These are actions that should be doable even by someone who feels the questions are "one step ahead of [their] competencies".  I strongly suspect that if all the questions that do have upvotable answers were given just one upvote, and all the not really quite clear enough questions where the OP will likely never return to clarify them were closed, our unanswered question rate would be much lower.  </p>
