Should the close vote privilege be dependent on flagging?

Question

I think that the awarding of the close & reopen privileges should be dependent on the number of helpful close flags and the %declined flags. The reason:

• Someone with a hundred helpful (close) flags and only a few declined flags probably knows how the system works.
• If a user has a great number of declined flags (>25%), then there is a good chance that he will also use close votes the wrong way.
• Someone who doesn't know very much about the topic, i.e. not enough to answer many questions, can still have a good judgement on closing and reopening.

I don't really care how it will be implemented.

If you have a good idea, please a post in an answer.

Answer 1

Someone who doesn't know very much about the topic, i.e. not enough to answer many questions, can still have a good judgement on closing and reopening questions.

They can also be incredibly bad judges of topicality when they have no understanding of the topic they're moderating. I've repeatedly found, for instance, C++ questions closed by folks with no C++ experience who assumed that the question was overly- subjective or broad because it would've been in the context of another language; I've also seen C++ aficionados trying to close Android API questions without realizing that in some cases there is literally no good documentation for some APIs outside of Stack Overflow.

Making this problem worse by introducing votes from folks without much demonstrated experience in any programming topic doesn't seem like a great idea to me.

And this isn't even getting into the whole reason for reputation requirements in the first place: if you don't have much skin in the game (posts on the site), why should you care about other people's work? Burn it all...

...Which brings me to the practical issue with this:

Close flags aren't declined

Even if a question is flagged and goes through review with the consensus as "Leave Open", the flag is merely disputed. And that requires three people to actually stand up for the question; a side effect of having a perpetual backlog in close review is that it can actually be more practical to just skip things that shouldn't be closed... The end result is that many more close flags age away than are disputed. Here's the breakdown for the past 90 days on Stack Overflow:

Name                       Close Flags 
-------------------------- ----------- 
Helpful                    72480       
Scheduled Task Invalidated 37387       
Disputed                   21222       
Declined                   300         
UserDeleted                38          
Event Invalidated          37          

So there's a lot less signal here than we might wish for. Let's see how this would actually work out if we deprived folks with > 25% disputed flags from further privileges:

I compiled a list of users with > 25% disputed close flags on Stack Overflow. There are about 1600 of them. Of those, 86 currently have close privileges (another 115 have edit privileges). During the past 90 days, they've cast 2128 close votes. For comparison, a total of 483094 close votes have been cast during this time.

The end result of this would do very little to reduce voting by inexperienced flaggers, at the cost of a large amount of complexity.

Answer 2

I agree very much with "the principle idea" of giving people privileges based on associated actions, so someone with 100 helpful flags and 5 declined is likely a good candidate for access to close votes etc. Whereas someone with "3K rep" could be amazing or absolutely terrible at flagging or voting to close etc, as rep has no bearing on flag/review ability.

The current X rep = privilege is pretty simple and works in a simple sense, whereas the problem with granting people access and privileges based on associated actions is it becomes quite complicated.

The rest of the answer is based on the original question with proposed solutions, and explains why it should be as simple as possible. Take the old proposal here as an example:

Someone with 90 helpful flags and 10 declined will need 2271 reputation

So they lose their privilege when they drop below 2271 rep, or gain another declined flag. then they gain their privilege back when they gain more helpful flags, or more rep.

It becomes worse when you consider that if both their rep increases and so does their declined flags, they have completely different rep total and accepted and declined flags to consider to know if they have the privilege or not, or when they get it back. In other words, it's a nightmare to track because their target to gain the privilege changes based on too many factors:

• total rep
• total flags (if we're to use some percentage)
• total helpful flags
• total declined flags
• potential ban

So the problem with your idea and many others which have complex scenarios is everyone's privileges are given, taken away, and given back far too frequently due to multiple possible influencing factors.
One day they'd not be doing close votes, the next day they would, and possibly even hours later not, then hours later they they would again.

Again, x rep = privilege is much more simple, and even if it's not perfect, it works for the most part. It certainly works enough when you include in the factor of problems a complicated system brings.
People raising Meta questions left right and centre about their X rep and Y flags and Z declined etc etc.