Making sense of the delete review queue

Question

I am having trouble interpreting the information in the 10K delete review queue.

The help center entry doesn't really go into detail about the UI. In particular, it is missing the following things, which I am wondering about:

• The meaning of the number to the left of the post.
• The meaning of the number in parentheses to the right of the post (note: it's explained in the tool tips).
• The color (dark blue, light blue, gray) of the post.

I have been told that X title (Y) means that a post has X delete votes and Y more are needed to actually delete it. The Y part seems right, but I just voted to delete a "3 title (1)" question, and on the question itself it said there were 9 delete votes, not 3. What does the X mean?

The colors, I think I've been able to deduce (also, I have tested and confirmed that dark vs. light blue is not related to the visited link status in the browser, although the gray ones are visited light blue ones, which I did not realize when I first posted this):

• Dark blue = closed.
• Light blue = on hold (or not able to be voted on?)
• Gray = unsure: either "open", or an answer (or not able to be voted on - although I just spotted this light blue question that I am not able to cast a delete vote on yet because it is too recent).

Is that correct?

Also, I am unclear on what it means for an answer to be in that queue. I just clicked a "1 title (2)" answer. It had a score of 0. But... I can't cast delete votes on answers. This seems to be a 20K privilege (which I do not have right now). However, that privilege only allows one to vote to delete answers that have a score of -1 or lower. All the answers I saw had a score of 0, which even a 20K user could not vote to delete. So, I am unsure what type of action is merited on an answer that appears in this queue. What is the UI asking me to do with answers?

TL;DR

1. What does X and Y in "X Title (Y)" mean and, if X is the number of votes cast, why does it not agree with the vote count present on the question page?
2. What do the colors mean?
3. What do I do with answers?
4. Bonus: Can the help center be updated with a description of the UI? (I may post this as a separate feature request).

Answer 1

My interpretation is the following. Some of this is from the tooltips that are shown when hovering over the numbers/links, other parts are derived from experimentation.

• The number on left is the number of delete votes the post already has. I noticed a few examples where there was a slight discrepancy between this number and the number of already cast delete votes shown in the post itself. Could be caching. Most of the time, the numbers are the same.
• The number in parentheses on the right is the number of delete votes still needed to delete the post.
• High intensity/brightness colors are the posts you can vote on.
• Low intensity/brightness colors are the ones you can't vote on (*).
• For both high and low intensity colors, the links with a more purely blue hue are the posts you have not visited yet, the more grayish links are for visited posts.

(*) The rules for being allowed to cast delete votes, copied from the 10K privileges page:

You must wait for a question to be closed for 2 days before you can vote for deletion. This restriction is removed for trusted users when a post scores -3 or lower.

where "trusted user" refers to users who have reached the 20K rep privilege level.