Notify users of possible reviews on toolbar [duplicate]

Question

I am under the impression that increased participation in the review queue is, on the whole a good thing. It encourages people to feel an ownership in the community and partially responsible for the site as a whole.

On Programmers.SE, I've seen what I believe to be an uptick in flagging to close (non-audits with no votes in the close queue). I believe that to be a good thing as it indicates to me that there are at least a few on P.SE who may some day become more active participants in the site.

On the other hand, I don't often see too many new names in the "recent reviews" page. There are often new names scattered about on close votes of recent questions which suggests to me there is a population of 3+k users who don't review, but do close recent questions.

While the close queue at P.SE is completely different than the one at SO (we start wondering about it in chat when it hits 20 and occasionally motivate people to help smash the queue back to 0), I was wondering if there wasn't something that could be done to help direct everyone possible to review (or at least be aware of it - there was a comment at one point of a 10k user who wasn't aware of anything in the /review link after clicking it as a new user and not seeing anything in it that could be done by him).

The suggestion

Next to the review link display the number of reviews that user is capable of doing at this time, akin to the way the 10k banner looks when there are flags or edits outstanding.

Many people perceive numbers as "there is something here that needs my attention". Inbox size, alerts on mobile device apps, notifications, etc... Using this it would be possible to point people to the review part of the application and help them become a more active participant in the site and the community as a whole.

This number would be:

min(first post queue size, first post audits doable) + min(late answer queue size, late answer audits doable) + ...

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There seems to be some confusion about what this would be and what the numbers on it would be.

I have used my considerable art skills (sorry, no pie) to make a mockup of what this would look like based on the current snapshot of what I see on P.SE

"Wait," you say... "why is that a 20? Shouldn't it be 24?"

Nope. Because on P.SE I can only do 20 close vote reviews a day (smaller queue or something of that nature). If you hit it with someone who hasn't reviewed most of the queue, you'll actually see that its 60. And still the answer should be 20.

And so, min(60,20) + min(0,20) + min(0,20) + min(0,20) + min(0,20) (those are the other queues there too) is 20. And that's the number that should be shown.

This should be something that you can get to 0 every day. Making it something that is an unmanageable number makes it something people will ignore, and that's not what this is suggesting.

Answer 1

As of a few minutes ago, we are replacing the pending suggested edit count in the top bar with the number of pending reviews for diamond moderators and folks with the "moderation tools" privilege (i.e. 10k users on graduated sites and whatever that level's at on betas):

We are excluding the Close Vote queue from this on Stack Overflow, and there's a minimum of 10 pending reviews that have to be in the system before the indicator will show up.

It is also cached, so may or may not be very accurate depending on the amount of ongoing activity in /review at any given time.

Answer 2

You're absolutely right that we can do more to get new reviewers active in all of our review queues. We're exploring a bunch of possibilities, but it will take some time to figure out what the right approach is; the ideas we like most are much more technically complicated than the ideas we could do fast, so we're trying to find a good balance.

There are a couple of problems with just displaying the number of reviews that a user is capable of doing at this time. The most obvious one is that as your reputation and access to review queues increases, so does the number of items you're eligible to review; our highest-rep users (some of whom are among the most active reviewers) would have a notification that's always on and that they can never clear to zero. This means they'd likely wind up just ignoring it.

The second big issue is scale; with over 100k items in the close review queue on Stack Overflow, for example, that number obviously affects the perceived impact a user thinks s/he can have. Ideally, we'd find a way to alert users of urgent and actionable review items – i.e., notifying them of items they're likely to care about and have an impact on, and show them a number that they can clear completely, or at least see go down substantially as a result of their actions.

The notion here is a good one, but I don't think your exact suggestion is the best implementation. I'm not yet sure what is, but I wanted to let you know we're working on it.

Answer 3

Meta discussions about site standards and accepted practices help to lay the groundwork for useful reviewing by explaining the philosophy and history behind the process. Since reviewing methods change over time, reviewers should be regular users of Meta so that they can keep up with the changes.

If we push a newly-anointed user into the review queue without that background, we run the risk of generating bad reviews. Proper training is important to ensure that the reviewers are in sync with the site goals and practices.

If we implement a strategy to get more eyes in the review queues, I think it should be accompanied by a strong push to acquaint reviewers with the Meta documentation on the subject.

Answer 4

If you want this feature for yourself now, you can install a user script to make it happen.

The following script that I wrote can be used in Firefox with Greasemonkey installed or in Chrome with TamperMonkey.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/184677