Is there a correlation between question scores and the number of answers?

Question

When I was answering the 'ridiculous question' question, I got to wondering about whether or not one could use the count of answers provided as some indication of the relative quality of borderline questions. I'd like to ask here though about going the other way.

To that end, I'm interested in knowing if there is any correlation between question score and answer count. If there is, are there questions with an unusually low score by comparison to the count of answers that they have received. If there is, and they're still open, has anyone considered the idea of adding bonus rep points to a user's rep (instead of the question) if the ratio falls below a certain ratio, the question is still in positive reputation territory and open?

At the very least, it would seem to be worth a badge of some kind.

I want to stress I'm not personally advocating this; it's a legitimate call for thoughts on whether or not attracting a high volume of (particularly high scoring) answers would be worth something to a question poster.

Answer 1

In general, answer count correlates with score for all posts (both closed and open). While closed questions are generally lower scoring considering the number of answers they get, the difference is not big enough in my opinion for it to be valuable as any sort of quality indicator.

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If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

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I used the following code in SEDE to get a CSV file of all the questions:

select answercount, count(*) as [heat], score from posts 
where parentid is null and answercount is not null
group by answercount, score

I used the CSV and an online plotting tool to this heatmap (note that the big weird boxes on the upper right of these graphs are all single points... I'm not sure why it displays like that):

Here's the query to get a CSV of all non-closed questions:

select answercount, count(*) as [heat], score from posts 
where parentid is null and answercount is not null and closeddate is null
group by answercount, score

Heatmap:

And closed:

select answercount, count(*) as [heat], score from posts 
where parentid is null and answercount is not null and closeddate is not null
group by answercount, score

Heatmap:

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Note: These queries can be changed to work better (but not great) in SEDE. Just change the first line of the query to

select answercount, score from posts 

And also remove the last line.

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