10

Now there are 60.4k 60.5k 60.6k 60.7k close votes.

My suggestion is to show the rates of voting to close questions and the rate of reviewing close votes on the review page. Like this:

In the last 30 minutes:

  • 100 questions received close votes
  • 40 questions has completed the close votes review

In the last 24 hours:

  • 4800 questions received close votes
  • 1860 questions has completed the close votes review

(Values are imaginary)

This can help us determine how much we need to speed up reviewing in order to cancel out the rate of questions being voted to close, in order to reduce the number of reviews in the close votes review queue.


My opinion is that if we have this data, we can motivate Stack Overflow users to help reviewing close votes ("Oh, we need that much people to help!") instead of thinking: "Other users will do the review and that's enough and I don't need to help."

5
  • 60.4K close votes??? dang!
    – user226423
    Jul 17, 2013 at 7:08
  • 2
    @Damien It was 58.1k about a week ago(!). Jul 17, 2013 at 9:00
  • @michaelb958 sheesh! that is a hell of a workload for you guys- i'll have to post more to get up to the rep level to be able to help.
    – user226423
    Jul 17, 2013 at 9:08
  • I don't know if it's useful to specify but this should be visible only to those who can do those reviews.
    – Marc-Andre
    Jul 17, 2013 at 14:40
  • 1
    @Marc-Andre The opposite would be to motivate new users to not create more bad questions.
    – Alvin Wong
    Jul 17, 2013 at 14:52

1 Answer 1

2

These would be interesting and fun stats to see, but I have to wonder whether adding this really have the desired effect. Would users feel that they need to close vote more? Or would it contribute to the "that's a big pile of close votes; I won't even make a dent so screw it" effect?

Additionally, since we're capped on the number of votes per day and can only vote once per question, there's an important choice to make on how to spend them. Do we vote against questions already in the queue, or jump on crappy new questions just posted? If the queue is growing in size, it seems the latter happens more often, on average.

The speed of casting votes doesn't really matter; it's the allocation which governs the change in queue size. We could implement a quota requiring X percent of votes per day be cast against questions already in the queue, but I suspect this would be quite unpopular. There are probably much better ideas out there for motivating this behavior; I'm just throwing that out as an example.

Rather than encourage users to focus on items in the close queue, or in tandem with doing so, we could encourage them to spend all their votes every day. The size of the queue strongly suggests that not all users do this. The obvious method to encourage doing so would be adding a new badge set.

Overall, I like this idea, and encouraging users to tackle the close vote queue is definitely worth doing. I'm simply not sure whether passive methods such as showing stats would be effective enough (read: worth spending dev time on when there are potentially better methods to achieve the same goals). A little bit of positive reinforcement goes a long way.

The opposite would be to motivate new users to not create more bad questions.

I think this goal is both more worthy and far more difficult.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .