Is there any way for "outsiders" to help a site with a full edit queue?

Question

Health is not very healthy. Many high level users have left. There are many low quality questions. While some need to be closed, others could be fixed with edits -- more descriptive titles might attract answers, clarifications have been added in comments, or the English just isn't great. In some cases a too-localized "what is wrong with me?" could be edited to a more general and answerable question.

With just a handful of users who can edit directly, these fixes (which would raise the site quality) have to be done as suggested edits. But the queue is full. Comments on that question indicate this is a long term problem.

Is it possible that people exist who could come and help? Community Managers maybe? Mods from another site? Is there any mechanism to get an edit queue cleared so that the few people who are willing to try to improve a site can do so? Or must it just languish?

Answer 1

The suggested edits queue is just a symptom of the larger issue. And it's actually one of the lesser symptoms.

The last closed question I can find is from March 28, there could be more closed and deleted ones, but it is extremely unusual that there are no recent closed questions at all. And looking a bit I found this completely meaningless, truncated question that has been there for more than two weeks and only has three close votes.

The site isn't being moderated at all, there are too few users without sufficient privileges that try to moderate the site. The site is actually close to violating the only requirement that SE imposes to keep a site running:

If a public beta site does not produce consistently helpful content, and lacks the caretakers needed for flags and spam to get handled and our Be Nice policy to be upheld, it will be closed.

There is a negative feedback cycle here that hurts any efforts to improve the situation as it becomes increasingly difficult to earn reputation on a site in a state like this. But without enough users with privileges, community moderation can't work. The only existing way to deal with this would be to hand out some more diamonds. A low traffic site like Health could be fully moderated by a few moderators without community support. But that can only be a stopgap until the community picks up the slack.

Answer 2

People without edit privileges on the site, as well as mods from other sites, cannot help (mods from other sites are just normal users everywhere else).

A CM could certainly help. However, this is probably not a good idea in the long run: In the bigger picture sense, if a CM has to step in, this isn't solving the site's real problems, and a CM can't be relied on to keep a site running, it has to be self-sustaining.

However, what we, as normal unprivileged users can do is: Spend some time on the site. In particular, visit the site, ask good questions, answer unanswered questions, vote on questions and answers. I don't mean randomly casting upvotes, I mean visit the site and participate legitimately. This has a few benefits:

• Most relevantly, increased site activity = increased votes = increased reputation = empowering more of the existing users with moderation privileges (this is why low activity sites have trouble with community moderation).
• You may discover a new community that you'd like to be a part of, and you may even help turn around an unhealthy beta site's fortunes.
• You may learn a few new interesting things browsing questions. For example, there are certainly some interesting questions worth reading in the top-voted questions list.

In other words, the long term solution for these types of problems is to "heal" them at their source; do what needs to be done to help support a beta site. Everything else follows. For users who aren't normally involved in the site, this means potentially finding a fun, new community.

For users who are already active on the site, what you can do is help spread the word. Try to think of ways to attract more users to the site. More users = more voting = more moderation privileges all around. Things like community ads, asking good questions that attract good answers and new users (and potentially end up on the HNQ list), talk about the site in your blogs, tell your friends about it, etc., etc.