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With the new /review route, the community is presented with a queue of posts they have to work through. One of these is Close Votes:

It enforces a very strict pattern – you basically choose to either close a question or not, with the ultimate goal that the number next to the queue eventually reaches zero (am I correct assuming that goal?).

So, my options are:

Now, the team should already have enough data to estimate how people use this queue. A few questions I would be very interested in:

  • Are people more likely to close questions now? You could probably test this by looking at the fraction of questions voted to close vs. total viewed questions, or the number of close votes used per day.

  • Do the right kind of questions become closed? While we are missing the ground truth on whether a question really should have been closed, do you believe that the system is working as intended, or does the missing feature of users being able to counter-vote just increase the likelihood of any question to become closed, even if it might have been a borderline case or not closeworthy at all? Which brings me to …

  • Do borderline questions just stick around in the queue or are they closed more quickly? If people are not sure, are they actually pressing do not close, or not sure? If they only pass the question along to others, are chances bigger that borderline questions are now much more likely to be closed, simply because the votes are adding up?

  • If the queue goes down to a small number, are new questions being closed faster? Once the queue is at 0 "votes" (might wanna change the word here), wouldn't that mean that any new question with a close vote is much more likely to become closed right away?

Finally, I was wondering if including a queue for questions to be reopened made sense. Feel free to leave a comment about that – but don't take this as a feature-request.

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  • Well unless we get some Mechanical Turk like sample, how would I know?
    – Ivo Flipse
    Commented Aug 2, 2012 at 14:55
  • @IvoFlipse It's not like they don't know how to use it ;) – but it would be hard for outsiders to estimate what's closeworthy and what is not.
    – slhck
    Commented Aug 2, 2012 at 14:56
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    @slhck What do you mean outsiders?
    – Josh Mein
    Commented Aug 2, 2012 at 15:03
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    @JoshMein In order to be able to judge whether a question should have really been closed, you probably need a lot of experience with the site the question was posted on. Getting this data via Mechanical Turk doesn't seem like the best solution.
    – slhck
    Commented Aug 2, 2012 at 15:05
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    @IvoFlipse A question for the devs, I presume.
    – user102937
    Commented Aug 2, 2012 at 15:20
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    We'll probably need a bit more time to collect data before we're ready to announce anything. #1 is easy to answer though: more questions are definitely getting closed (as well as edited and deleted). #2 and #3 are really hard to figure out. #4 is presumably "yes" but I haven't actually run the query.
    – David Fullerton
    Commented Aug 2, 2012 at 20:12
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    I'm finding it helpful so far. I would find it more helpful if I could see more than one question at a time, rather than having to make a decision (that I won't get to revisit later) on one in order to see the next. Maybe I only want to look at duplicates, or skim for my particular areas of expertise, or otherwise pick out a subset. This system doesn't appear to let me do that -- but it's still better than nothing at all.
    – Monica Cellio
    Commented Aug 14, 2012 at 4:08
  • @Monica: I would like to work some of the filtering available in the old close review page into this, purely as a power-user feature, but that'll take a bit of work. For now, there is some logic to try and identify questions you might have an interest in based on your tags, so hopefully you don't have to hit "skip" too often.
    – Shog9
    Commented Aug 14, 2012 at 16:57

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While I have only been on SO a short time, I can say with utter certainty that it is causing me to vote "Close this off" a hell of a lot more. Having said that, I am only voting to close questions that are indeed worthy of being closed. Out of my close votes yesterday, I think more than half would have accounted for a question along the lines of "supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource" of which there are hundred of duplicates. I think a good portion of this is because if I see a question with that in the header, I simply don't open it up. This gives you a question seemingly in a random order - so you don't really get to pick and choose (aside from Close/Do Not Close). If users could vote to close from the new questions queue, I think a LOT more users would be hitting their 50 close flag cap on a daily basis.

On that note though, I am very surprised at some of the questions that have ended up in the close queue. Why are questions that have accepted answers and a number of upvotes even there? Doesn't an accepted answer basically close the question off anyhow? I understand that poor quality questions might end up in there, but a good number of them had no close votes on them.

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    An answered question can still be closed. If the answer is good, but the question is poor, you might consider editing it rather than closing. If both are good, then that "Do Not Close" button helps get it out of the queue faster. A big goal for this queue is to reduce the number of questions that sit around for months with a few close votes hanging off of them, either by closing them out or confirming that they're fine as-is.
    – Shog9
    Commented Aug 14, 2012 at 16:54

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