There is a problem with the close vote queue that it seems it won't ever go away. There are always proposals to increase the number of allowed items you can do a day, but that alone won't help, as the major problem with doing the close vote queue is, that it's really tedious, boring and depressing.
The main problem is that the action that needs to be taken to determine whether a close vote is valid or not is different for the 5 closed vote reasons. Of course you can always filter to only one type but that's not really advertised (I made around 1200 reviews before I've actually found out that you can filter, and only because of meta posts that describe the problems of the close vote queue system). This means that although doing close votes is the second easiest way to earn a gold medal (if you have 3k rep), people still not doing it enough.
My proposal is to reorganize the close vote system, that allows easier voting, more votes/day, and which (hopefully) will also increase the quality of the reviews.
Virtual queues
The main idea is to separate the current queue to 3 separate virtual queues. There would be separate queues for Duplicate, Off-Topic and one for the remainig three (for reasoning read on). Each virtual queue allows 30 reviews/day/person, the first 15 close vote in each queue is "free" (won't decrease your daily allowance of 50), and you will only get a maximum of 40 points to the real close vote queue.
Visually it would look like this (note: this is based on the old type of close votes, in the new close vote system there would only be 3 queues, but you can get the idea):
The main ideas behind the virtual queues are:
- Separating the close vote types will make it easier to concentrate to the reviews, but on the other hand will require reviewers (who are doing filtering currently) to actually do more/all of the close types each day.
- 4*30 = 90 reviews/day, which is more than twice the amount of the current limit
- Max 40 point gained limit will mean that robo-reviewers will have less reason to do the queue (well, at least after the first 40), so the close vote queue won't become the easiest gold badge source.
How should be virtual queues be populated? It's easy:
- Each queue gets all of the questions that have at least one flag or vote for that type
- If you do a question in any of the virtual queues, it will be removed for all of the other queues for you
- If two reviewers click on "Leave open", then the question will be removed from all of the queues for all of the users (as it works today).
Close vote interface changes
Now, increasing the avialable number of reviews/day won't solve the other issue, that doing the close votes properly is not really supported with the current interface, which needs to be adapted for each of the close vote types separately.
Globally we'd need a separate button of "Close as XXXX" for each queue, that will open the appropriate close vote box (for the unclear/too broad/opinion based queue it would open the list of these three options) As this might make it easy for robo-reviewers to actually mash this button instead of the "Leave open" one, we could use the same audit questions as are used inside the Reopen queue to filter those users out. Yes I'm aware of the fact that the reopen audit questions are sometimes flawed.)
(EDIT: here I talked about having different UI based on the different close vote virtual queues, but they were already done somewhat. I would still show at least the top voted / accepted answer to make it easier for example to determine whether the question was actually just a typo, but these additions already have their separate proposal pages)
TL;DR
Too many items in close vote queue, need more virtual queues and the interface should be different based on the queue you're in.
