Should close votes not through /review count towards the review badges?

Question

Currently, close votes on questions via question pages do not count towards review badges (Custodian, Reviewer, Steward), while close votes through the review path do. I believe that close votes cast on questions that already have at least one close vote should count as review tasks.

Essentially, when a question has one close vote on it, it ends up in the queue. Casting a close vote on one of these questions is therefore the same as casting a close vote in the queue. Therefore, it is a review task, except the question was found from browsing the site by other means, rather than from the review path. It's the same either way, with the user-interface used being the only difference.

The requirement for a preexisting close vote is important, because the first vote just increases the queue size, while subsequent votes are working through the queue as usual. Casting the first vote is not equivalent to a review task.

My motivation is personal, based on a desire for badges while maintaining my current usage patterns. Additionally, Reviewer and Steward are used as moderator candidate score criteria but at the same time they exclude all close vote reviews done through a different user interface -- this does not seem correct.

The primary targets of my close votes are:

• Questions brought up in chat rooms, that have been around for some time with some close votes already on them.
• Questions in the first few pages of the recent question list.
• Occasionally, I'll click on the question link in the close queue for various reasons, then vote from there. This does not count as a review task.

I have also heard tell of users who navigate the queue through the API, casting votes through the question page.

All of these are generally already in the queue, the only difference being that I didn't find them via the review path. At the moment I have a roughly 5:1 ratio of close votes cast to review tasks.

The major argument against this that I can think of is the current system does encourage people going for the badges to go through the review queue interface and, while it doesn't make much difference for the close vote queue (review interface vs. elsewhere) it does potentially attract users to notice the other queues. I.e. it gives an extra reason to go to the /review page; a good side-effect.

Are there any other arguments for or against? What do you guys think? What interface do you normally use to cast the majority of your close votes?

Answer 1

First off, this is almost a duplicate of a previous suggestion: Badge for Closing Question

So I'll stick to addressing the bits that are unique...

Review badges for reviewing outside of /review

This is pretty much a non-starter. Those badges exist to encourage and reward participation in the review system; if you're not using the review system, then our encouragement has failed and there's nothing to reward.

Your argument is essentially that you prefer a different UI, a different means of selecting and prioritizing questions in need of review. That's fair. Your call... But you shouldn't really expect to be recognized elsewhere for it, any more than you'd expect to gain standing in the Freemasons for your time with the Elks.

If you want recognition for your efforts, then implement some sort of badge system in chat, or support the feature-request I linked to above.

Candidate score

If badges for using close and reopen votes existed, they'd make perfect sense as part of the candidate-score. But even then, I'd want review badges to count separately, as they actually do a better job of reflecting the sort of tasks you'll be doing as a moderator. Even if you're doing a great job moderating questions you encounter organically, you still gotta handle the flags. If you close a lot of stuff but can't handle making decisions on questions you didn't personally pick, you're gonna have a bad time as a moderator.

Since we don't have close/reopen badges, this is a non-starter as well.