Allow "Skip" to count towards Steward badge progress

Question

The gamification of the review queues is often fingered as the culprits incentive for hastily completing review tasks.

The Steward badge is not currently used as any kind of metric, and from discussions I have seen would never be a reliable metric of user worth due to robo reviewers.

Lets just give take away the incentive for them to cause harm to the system.

It's been discussed that There is no shame in using "Skip" and I agree, if you are unsure of the correct action to take using skip is the correct action. So I see no harm in rewarding the user for not making a hasty judgement.

This may actually encourage proper reviewing for those who actually do want to help the community while trying to earn their badge.

Ultimately, I see no harm in making the badge easier to achieve if it mitigates the harm caused by poor reviews. The amount required for the badge could always be increased.

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I actually much prefer Gnat's idea to my original thought as it achieves a similar goal, while keeping the value of the gold badge - which is what people are objecting to.

Answer 1

I think Skip should (and could) be used to make a badge harder to achieve and teach reviewer a good habit along the way, like:

awarded for 1000 reviews and no less than 25% skip actions

Above means, fewer than 25% skips would block receiving a badge.

^{Per my experience, a healthier dose would be like 50% skips, but for teaching purposes, 25% could probably be just fine.}

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Note how electorate-badge has an additional requirement somewhat similar to above:

you must have voted on at least 600 questions and of all your votes ever cast, 25% or more must have been on questions.

Have to admit, my own voting habits were rather heavily tilted on answers at first. This changed right during my first hunt for Electorate badge, which taught me to vote on questions.

Hopefully additional requirement will teach (at least some of) reviewers to be less reluctant to Skip.

Answer 2

A steward is one who assumes responsibility for the care/maintenance of something - in this case a review queue. Someone who ignores the content and mashes on the "skip" button is not exercising stewardship and to my mind such a person is not deserving of the Steward badge.

An argument could be made that someone with a certain number of actioned reviews who has also frequently used the "skip" button to pass over things they're not unsure of should be granted a different badge ("restraint"? "responsibility"?) for not merely spamming junk actions in the queue to get the steward badge, but frankly I don't see the value in that either.

Badges should be at least somewhat difficult to obtain - particularly gold ones. They're not a reward just for showing up.

Answer 3

Obviously giving away gold badges for three minutes of work is pretty extreme. But the objective of your request still does have merit.

I think the right thing to do is reinforce the positive effect skipping has (fewer erroneous reviews), while still encouraging the actual reviewing.

I propose allowing a small number of skips to count toward the steward badge - no more than 10%. That way you're still required to review at least 900 posts, but the quality of your reviews are likely to be higher, and so arguably still "worth 1000 reviews"