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Why isn't any reputation awarded for reviewing in general? Especially close requests take a while to read the question and answers, duplicate question close requests often require a deeper knowledge of the topic. It does not seem to be a very popular task to do since there a tens of thousands of close requests in the queue. Would awarding reputation help to get this done?

On the other hand I often see an edit is already approved unchanged while I was working on improvements, reputation awards might animate a few individuals to click through approve till the stack is empty.

What are your thoughts?

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    People already abuse the queues as it is (to get the badges). I don't think this is a good idea.
    – Josh Mein
    Commented Jan 15, 2013 at 14:51
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    Reviewing only gives me negative reputation because of the downvotes for bad posts. But as long as the total amount stays above 20k, that is not a problem.
    – Toon Krijthe
    Commented Feb 11, 2013 at 12:54
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    @ToonKrijthe Exactly. You do the work, and only lose reputation for that ... because 90% is crap and has to be downvoted/flagged ... and, if your name is listed under the questions/answer in the auto-generated comments, the OPs start downvoting your own posts - they don't get that they (most likely) got downvoted by peer review, and not just by a person that dislikes them.
    – djot
    Commented Sep 30, 2013 at 15:55
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    Asker is saying "Why isn't any reputation awarded" and includes rate-limited awards. This includes "limit one point per day" which addresses many issues below.
    – William Entriken
    Commented Oct 22, 2013 at 16:36

3 Answers 3

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...reputation awards might animate a few individuals to click through approve till the stack is empty.

Yes, this is at least partly why reputation isn't awarded for reviews. A balance has to be struck between getting things done and getting them done right. If you add too much incentive to an activity, some people will often just do it for the reward. We really want people who are motivated by the activity itself (improving or closing posts) to be the ones who do most of the reviews.

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    True, having badges for this is more than enough..
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jan 15, 2013 at 14:58
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    For majority-vote reviews (e.g. suggested edits) one could get +1 reputation if one shares the optinion of the majority (e.g. I chose 'Accept' and the edit is actually accepted), and -1 otherwise...
    – tobias_k
    Commented Feb 7, 2013 at 21:00
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    @tobias_k Since agreeing with the majority has zero real value (not negative value, but not positive either), that would be a bad thing. People shouldn't be voting on how they think other people will vote. That's a destructive behavior and incentivizing it would be terrible.
    – Eliah Kagan
    Commented Feb 11, 2013 at 14:28
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As a Data Scientist I totally agree with the points in the OP. This is because using Machine Learning algorithms cheat detection should be fairly easy. After all there is already fake edits examples to test users are paying attention.

All we need is more examples of fake bad edits as currently the fake ones are super easy to spot because they are that bad. We need some more subtle ones, like correcting formatting, but subtly deleting a line of code or something like that.

Furthermore we can apply machine learning techniques to other signs, like

  • the time it takes to review,
  • whether they are reviewing questions which have tags that they don't seem to have any clue about, (i.e. do they have upvoted answers with the same tags?)
  • do they tend to agree or disagree with other users? Also can use the other uses reputation as a signal.

This brings me to another point - I often get asked to review edits I have no clue about because it's in some language I don't know about. Why doesn't the system recognize I ask/answer questions on specific tags and only give me review requests for similar questions/answers.

I agree with the OP and believe something needs to be done to reward reviewing because as of today I'm no longer going to review edits until the reward is better.

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might animate a few individuals to click through approve 'till the stack is empty

This already happens. The below suggestion is partly to prevent that.

As I briefly suggested in a question I just asked:

Increase reputation if other people agree with your review, a smaller (or maybe larger?) decrease if they don't (not currently applicable to close votes I believe since you can't decline a close vote, or can you?, but maybe it should be).

A negative review reputation doesn't decrease your overall reputation (but a positive one increases it, maybe to a limit), but significantly reduces the number of review tasks you're allowed to do (or simply disallows reviews).

Perhaps allow users with a high review reputation to do more review tasks.

The above basically translates to: click approve through queue -> you can't review any more (among other things).

EDIT:

An alternative is to have this be a completely separate number (possibly combined with doing approved edits).

And then there's this.

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