Is the review queue helping more than it's hurting?

Question

The more I see how the new review system works in practice, the less I like it.

StackOverflow is not just a single community, but many semi-independent communities roughly organized by tags. Users have favorite tags, and ignore others. Nobody is a member of all communities equally.

However, the review system doesn't respect this, as far as I can tell. It encourages and enables people to review questions and answers outside of the communities in which they are active, respected and knowledgeable. Is that a good thing? Keep in mind that large communities can easily swamp small ones through sheer numbers.

As an example, here are four recently closed Haskell questions:

• Why does this code consume so much heap?

• Haskell Parse error on 'let'

• Autoconverting Haskell code to camelcase

• Haskell Boyer Moore Implementation

Other than myself, I couldn't find a single of the close-voters who had any Haskell points.

The problem isn't that the questions should or should not have been closed; it's that the issue was decided 'for' the Haskell community by outsiders. Although I personally felt the questions should have been closed, I'm used to the old system in which it took 5 votes to close a question; I almost feel as though I single-handedly closed the questions by casting the first vote, which put the posts into the review queue and attracted the attention of users who would otherwise probably never have come across these questions. My soul is filled with regret ( boo-hoo-hoo :( ), because (except for the last one) I cast the first close vote.

I have a couple of ideas for addressing this:

1. get rid of the review queue. If there's no review queue, users won't have any reason to look at posts. Meanwhile, people who are knowledgeable in their favorite tags are the ones who will be active there, closing/reopening/editing posts.

2. segregate review tasks by tag, similar to how tag wiki voting is done.

3. get rid of parts of the review queue. Or restrict access to parts of it. Perhaps higher rep limits, no close vote review, etc.

Are there any other thoughts on this? Anybody else frustrated by this?

Answer 1

It encourages and enables people to review questions and answers outside of the communities in which they are active, respected and knowledgeable. Is that a good thing?

In my opinion, yes, it is. It is specifically one of the reasons the review queues were created in the first place.

In many of the small communities you refer to, it's often difficult to get enough traffic to close questions, despite the fact that (barring certain types of exact duplicate questions) little to no knowledge of the topic is required to know if it should be closed.

Suggested edits likewise rarely require knowledge of the content to be reviewed, but having lots of suggested edits sitting around for long periods of time waiting for a reviewer from that sub-community to see it would be harmful.

As for first/last posts, they were specifically created because those posts often benefit substantially from some attention from more experienced SO users (sometimes from within the same tag communities, sometimes not) to help newer posters get used to the rules/guidelines of SO. For these queues more can be done (especially with answers, but also for questions) when you know the subject material, which is why the queue will, to the best of it's ability, prefer giving you questions in tags your active in. There are still beneficial activities that can be done in these queues without knowledge of the content, but it's admittedly less.