How slow is the Close Votes queue being processed? And how large should it get daily when the backlog is gone? [duplicate]

Question

After a few months, the Close Votes queue's large backlog is slowly climbing down, but in the short term we still see regular upward spikes.

I'm curious, when it reaches a manageable size, how manageable will it probably be? Will it ever reach a manageable size?

I ran a naïve-and-slow-as-hell query on the Data Explorer. It tries to fetch the daily amount of questions in and out of the queue, and shows that the number of questions entering the queue each day is usually larger than the number of closed questions on the same day. That means the queue would never empty.

But my query does not account for close vote aging, or questions leaving the queue for gathering enough "do not close" votes. I'm not even sure that data is available on SEDE. So my conclusion is probably not true.

Does anyone have reliable statistics on that?

Answer 1

According to Huge Close Votes review queue on SO, the total was 55K questions to review back in October. 7,000 questions have been removed from the queue since then, so I think that's pretty good progress. If it keeps up at the same pace, we should have it cleared in just under 21 months from now, so around October of 2015.

I've been watching the stats for that queue for the past several weeks, and I noticed that there's a little bit of overlap between the daily and all-time leaders. This tells me two things:

1. Some people do stay interested in reviewing questions for closure beyond the point where they've gotten a gold badge for it.

2. Plenty of new people are also helping out in review.

Those two things make me hopeful that the pace will at least stay steady (if not increase) for a while to come.

Answer 2

Extrapolating a little what Bill the Lizard said:

• We have around 3k reviews a day (based on today's stats)
• It probably takes around 7 reviews per post to remove from queue

So we have:

• ~400 posts leave the queue daily
• ~24k posts left the queue in 2 months (since October)
• ~24k - 7k = ~17k posts entered the queue in two months
• ~280 posts enter the queue every day

Looks reasonable!

Answer 3

21 months wow. I am not questioning this estimate but I would want to figure why should it take that long.

Let's see, we've got more than 10 thousands users above 3K rep who could work in this queue.

Assuming 7 reviews per item, about 300,000 review actions are needed to handle 40,000 items.

• Now, let's look at above data from badges perspective. 300,000 review actions mean 300 golden Steward badges.

How easy is to obtain these badges? Dead easy if one filters items correctly (in my experience, it takes about 10-20 minutes of work a day after first few dozens reviews) and rather difficult otherwise.

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Okay so what do we have? There are 300 golden badges laying in front of about 10,000 eligible users. These badges could be obtained by spending 10-20 minutes daily for less than a month (1000 review actions, limited by 40 per day -> 25 days).

300 freaking easy golden badges that could drain 40,000 items from the queue in less than a month, and so little interest in these among 10,000 eligible users - why?

• ^{Steward badge page currently shows less than 700 users, including even badges obtained in other queues. For a feature where we've got about 50,000 users aware about (per amount of Custodian badges), that's fairly low number.}

Above reasoning shows that observed speed of processing the queue is much much slower than it could be. We are getting 20+ months estimate while something like 2-3 looks entirely possible.

I believe this is because the way how close vote queue is presented to users makes review flow look harder than it really is.