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The close-vote review queue gets bigger and bigger every day.

Some say they are discouraged by the sheer number of outstanding close-votes. What can we do to encourage reviewing? Display a fake number as review queue size?

Currently we have approximately 1400 review items per day. Why not display the number of unreviewed items for today? It should be a number way below 1000.

And while we are at it - why not put today's review items first in the queue and when the (user-filtered) queue is empty*, display older review items?

* And if one gets a new message like "There are no more items to review for today" 1/30/100 times we could give away shiny badges!

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  • 3
    I've sometimes wondered if given the close vote expiration rules, is there a level of review activity that's required to actually reduce the queue, and below that, the effect is actually, on average, to expand the queue, because the votes cast slow the rate at which Q's exit the queue.
    – joran
    Aug 14, 2013 at 22:15
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    One way to encourage people (or at least me) to review (again||more) is to add in a way to dispute review audits, because I'm not touching the review queues again until I can flag bad audits. Another is to let those who wish to review a lot review more per day than the current limit...
    – jball
    Aug 14, 2013 at 22:16
  • @jball Is this feature-request up anywhere? I really like this idea, and I've wondered why the review queue is so huge myself too (which is how I ended up here), so this suggestion may be useful to reduce it.
    – joeytje50
    Jan 25, 2014 at 1:08
  • @joey, there have been a number of suggestions on review audit disputation including one where I floated my own suggestion, and a number of answers to the overwhelming close vote review queue questions (e.g.) that advocate increasing the number of reviews allowed.
    – jball
    Jan 27, 2014 at 18:40
  • the problem has been (at last) acknowledged and addresed by SE team: Enough fuzzying: let's let everything into the close queue and age out questions that don't reach a threshold
    – gnat
    Apr 29, 2014 at 22:03

2 Answers 2

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I think "encourage reviewing" should not justify "hiding the reality". If we don't know the truth about the close-vote queue abnormal size we will not have this discussions in meta which will lead to a better solution. The idea to display the number of unreviewed items for today sounds like a good alternative. And maybe when that number is zero, show the real number? or always have 2 numbers in today/total format. That would show the reality but still engage for action with the "today" numbers.

I agree with jball's idea (and maybe others) that it should be allowed to review more than the daily limit to those who want it.

Another Idea came to me also: I think Stack Overflow (SO) today has new proportions between users. Due to the SO success the proportion between "expert" users and "un-expert" has changed since 1-3 years ago, maybe with about the same number of "expert" but a huge number less "expert" users that are unclear in their questions (correct me if I'm wrong, I'm kind of new here). I thought also about giving first posts by a <500 OP a "stand-by" status until reviewed by a +500 user. If the +500 user get points for this it will take a matter of seconds until they are reviewed. This will raise the quality of first questions and make the close votes queue drop I think.

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  • Maybe show “Number of review tasks created in last 24hr” and “Number of review task completed in last 24 hrs”
    – Ian Ringrose
    Feb 18, 2014 at 11:05
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I recently noticed that the moderation tools provide a very good functionality, just for >10K users:

Review > Tools > Close (https://stackoverflow.com/tools?tab=close)

In the Close votes section, click the arrow and press "sort by close reason".

Over there you can see the list of question having votes to close. The very good thing is that they are sorted by number of close votes DESC. So you have a full list of 4 close votes items, that is they just need an extra vote to be closed.

Checking this list the close vote queue can be decreased way faster for the questions with big amount of close votes (3 or 4).

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