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Seriously, in just the last few hours we have:

Close Votes review: I'm going on a strike!

Reward me for my community service

Allow direct linking to a filtered /review queue

Display the number of pending review tasks created in the past 24 hours for the Stack Overflow close review queue

Can we just make some kind of Community Wiki where people can put suggestions/additions/complaints, rather than have 20 posts about this? I think everyone here knows the queue is big. No one from the "home office" has weighed in yet, but I'm sure they're working on it. Constantly adding new posts about it isn't going to help, in fact it only clouds the site.

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    Wait, what? There are too many posts about this, so you're going to solve it by making another one about making another one?
    – user102937
    Nov 20, 2013 at 22:27
  • It should have been that way from the get-go, but I fear there's just too much junk about this spread all over the place to be able to do anything about it now.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Nov 20, 2013 at 22:28
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    @RobertHarvey - Should I just make them go away with a Mind Meld? Yes, someone has to draw a line in the sand and say, "Enough is enough." There's really no need for more posts on the subject.
    – Johnny Bones
    Nov 20, 2013 at 22:28
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    @RobertHarvey He wants to create a canonical post, then close all of the other posts as duplicates of that.
    – user215114
    Nov 20, 2013 at 22:28
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    Oh, and weighed in: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/208288/…, meta.stackexchange.com/questions/208287/…. Perhaps you missed that an SE employee posted those feature requests.
    – user102937
    Nov 20, 2013 at 22:29
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    Obligatory xkcd; There are too many standards
    – Richard Tingle
    Nov 20, 2013 at 22:31
  • Isn't this the fundamental goal of closing duplicate questions, to have all the info in one place? Seriously, I don't see any problem in doing this.
    – user215114
    Nov 20, 2013 at 22:39
  • Why is this question downvoted? I upvoted it myself.
    – user215114
    Nov 20, 2013 at 22:48
  • @gparyani - It's completely ironic that it's been downvoted. Isn't the whole idea of the close votes queue to minimize noise on the site?
    – Johnny Bones
    Nov 20, 2013 at 22:55

1 Answer 1

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I wish.

The whole situation around the Close Votes queue being too large is a perfect example of how damaged our Meta system here is, and why people really need to focus on the problem in their questions rather than blurting out solutions and just sort of touching the problem without actually explaining it. Now we have who knows how many questions and feature requests floating around on Meta which all relate to each other, and a lot of which cover the same exact information, or suggest things so incredibly similar that they could probably do with just a single post that combines them into the best solution.

What it should be.

There definitely should be one canonical post on Meta. What is it about? Highlighting the problem of the oversized queue. It should explain all the different opinions that people have brought up for why it is a problem and why it should be fixed. No solutions. They simply don't belong in the question body. They should all be posted as separate answers to the question.

So what's the problem?

Well, once you've gone down the dark road of having a different question for every possible solution, it's just too damn hard to combine them all together into one question. You'd not only have to write a new question to explain the problem thoroughly, but you'd also have track down every possible solution and post those all as answers to that question, and then close them all as duplicates. You'd also get all of those people whining that "my question is a specific feature request and not a duplicate of that" and the whole world will literally fall apart.

This issue is actually something that has bugged me for a long time, and I've been working on a lengthy blog to identify the problems with it and how to work around it. Admittedly, some recent personal issues have caused it to fall into the depths of my computer, but now that everything has settled down, I'm a bit excited to get working on it again and hopefully have it published soon. It also explains everything much more thoroughly than I have here.

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    An appropriate tag and tag wiki may be a bit more useful (up one level in the hierarchy and easy to mark) rather than trying to keep a cw question up to date (and a mess for discussion).
    – user213963
    Nov 20, 2013 at 23:04
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    @MichaelT I don't think a tag for a localized issue that only identifies a single problem is at all useful. In fact, someone tried to create one quite a while ago and it was swiftly destroyed. It's called a "meta-tag."
    – animuson StaffMod
    Nov 20, 2013 at 23:06
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    You've got a few tags that have been synonmized to vote-to-close that would otherwise be appropriate for the tag wiki... and if one is after the collection of questions rather than trying to do a cw to gather them, the tagwiki seems like a better place to work that.
    – user213963
    Nov 20, 2013 at 23:09
  • Re finding them all: some of that work has already been done
    – Richard Tingle
    Nov 21, 2013 at 11:12

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