55

As part of our efforts to improve the Review Queues, the Public Platform team is creating Help Center pages for each individual queue. We're here to solicit the community’s help to make sure that this first edition of Help Center pages are accurate and sufficient in educating both new reviewers and anyone else struggling with review tasks without overwhelming them with details.

Why are we doing this?

Moving forward, the team would like to make more regular updates to the Help Center and make it more useful to our users as a canonical source of information. We’d like to start this initiative by creating new pages about how to use the Review queues.

Currently, the majority of Review queue information, what they are and how to use them, can only be found on Meta. This information is often more detailed than the beginner or average user needs. By creating canonical pages in the Help Center, this content becomes easier to link to and find.

Rest assured, we will not be getting rid of the community wiki pages already created around this subject and the Help Center will continue to link to relevant Meta articles as necessary. By directing users to the Help Center, Meta can better focus on specific questions, problems, supplementary information, and discussion.

Open for review

We took a look at multiple community wiki articles as a starting point for each of the drafts. These first drafts are an attempt to boil down the articles to the most essential information necessary to understanding each queue with a consistent tone and format.

Moderation and curation is an important aspect of our site. We want to ensure that we’re equipping reviewers with enough information to exercise the Review privilege to the best of their abilities. We see it fitting to ask our community and veteran reviewers to provide feedback around what you may have wanted to know when first using these queues. We’ve posted each of these drafts as their own post so that you may provide focused feedback as a new answer on each post.

Stack Overflow only:

When reviewing these drafts please consider the following:

  1. What is essential to know about using each queue?

  2. Is there any information that’s missing or should be removed?

These new Help Center pages are an addition to the future onboarding components we plan to make to the Review queues. We will keep you posted as we implement additional changes.

Improve this question
2
  • 2
    Thanks for this project! Looking forward to some good documentation :)
    – V2Blast
    Commented Nov 3, 2020 at 21:56
  • 5
    Hey, Lisa - it looks like there's a design flaw in the way Low Quality review works on questions on sites other than Stack Overflow. It's possible for such reviews to be drawn out over several months; see meta.stackexchange.com/q/356261/377214. I've posted an answer as to why there. (You may recognize that flowchart.)
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Commented Nov 5, 2020 at 12:20

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
28

Back in April, when you first mentioned the review queue overhaul project, you said:

We’ll be using community feedback to continue to iterate on this work.

And it's really nice to see you delivering on that bit. Having all of these separate questions for each queue's help center article for community feedback is awesome.

Moving on...

Currently, the majority of Review queue information, what they are and how to use them, can only be found on Meta. This information is often more detailed than the beginner or average user needs. By creating canonical pages in the Help Center, this content becomes easier to link to and find.

Seriously agreed. I left an answer on the aforementioned project overhaul post that said:

I feel as though the act of reviewing isn't too difficult to pick up on, provided the information given to the user is simultaneously succinct and complete.
...
On one hand, I would prefer not to dig through a lot of old meta posts to be able to review correctly. On the other, I really do want to review correctly, and I have spent a large amount of my time ensuring that my review choices were correct.

While I love how detailed the FAQ are, having an official guidance that's succinct is important, and I'm in agreement with you that some of the information within those FAQ articles is a bit excessive for new reviewers. I really hope the help center articles will do what they're intended to do, which is to compact the relevant information for new reviewers into an easy-to-read article. Reviewing is important for site health, and onboarding new users into it should be as seamless as possible. Good luck moving forward with this!

Rest assured, we will not be getting rid of the community wiki pages already created around this subject and the Help Center will continue to link to relevant Meta articles as necessary. By directing users to the Help Center, Meta can better focus on specific questions, problems, supplementary information, and discussion.

Honestly really happy to see this. There are a couple of users who dedicate a sizeable amount of time to updating the FAQ on this site to ensure users who happen to require guidance get the right guidance. I'm glad that the community curated FAQs won't simply be meaningless once the relevant information is baked into the help center.

As a final note...

Thank you, sincerely, for opening the help center drafts to community review. There are a lot of very experienced reviewers and moderators who are already posting answers to the linked questions, suggesting improvements and iterating on important bits they wish they got when they first started. I have faith that their suggestions will make it into the final drafts, and that they'll be useful for future users as they make their way onto the site.

Improve this answer
1
  • 8
    "having an official guidance that's succinct is important" this, so much this. While users don't read, they certainly don't read long documents. Making these instructions as short and sweet as possible is mandatory if it's going to have the desired effect.
    – Ian Kemp
    Commented Nov 3, 2020 at 14:09
20

"... creating Help Center pages for each individual queue. ... We’d like to start this initiative by creating new pages about how to use the Review queues.". You should start here, and make sure the quick help ("Basic Workflow") is adequate:

Close Votes - Quick Help

That particular example (the only screenshot example available to me, ATM) isn't as lacking as some of the other queues, more examples will be added as they are noticed; while doing future reviews.

One spot where I notice some difference of opinion (and what appear to be frequent review audits) is in the Low Quality Posts queue:

Low Quality Posts - Quick Help

It's nowhere near as helpful (and shiney) as the Triage queue Quick Help on Stack Overflow:

Triage - Quick Help

While each individual line could be more detailed at least it has two Help links.

Improve this answer
13

Expanding on Rob's excellent suggestion, I think there really is a need to include a link to a page with further information about the specific review queue you are in.

So SO's:

Confused? Read the detailed guide for triaging questions.

Should be in all queues, for all sites.

Improve this answer
12

If the modal can detect if the user is a ♦ moderator, it can be useful (at least for new mods) to include some kind of explanation about their binding vote in all the review queues.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .