First question in Review isn't really a first question

Question

I was browsing through the SO review section for "first questions," and came across this one:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6197227/how-to-show-latest-post-from-each-category-with-thumbnail-for-wordpress

Problem is, it's definitely not his first question, as one can see:

https://stackoverflow.com/users/755084/ramkumar

The only other Meta question I could find that matched this problem is:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/79990/first-question-review-bug

But it remains woefully unanswered. The lone commenter suggests it might be because none of the other questions received an upvote, so I pose my question(s) now:

1. Is it true that if none of your questions get upvotes, each new one you ask is classified by the system as your "first" question?
2. Is that a bug or intentional?

If that is indeed intentional, isn't that kind of silly? Even without upvotes, users are bound to get experience from answers and comments within their previous questions, and will probably improve in the future. I know we don't always see this, which is why I said probably... "frequent questioners" are often rather myopic about the effort that should go into a question. It just seems a little odd in this case to flag new questions as "first." Would it make more sense to create a new category for this? It would already sort of fit under "low quality posts," except that it doesn't quite hit that criteria either.

I didn't include feature-request here because I'm not sure that it's intentional, and if it is, I'm not sold that it's worth having a new feature to deal with it. It's really not a huge problem or anything, but it's there.

Answer 1

So, honestly, I don't understand what you think the problem is here...

Do you think that question doesn't deserve to be shown in the /review tab? Because I definitely do. It's a terrible question, badly in need of some reformatting and other editorial attention:

how to show latest post from each category with thumbnail for wordpress? for example i have Lot of Categories like Food,Technology etc.,Now I want to get the Latest Post from all those Categories with Thumbnail of the Post Image.I Think This will Challenge for your Coding knowledge.or else any plugin can do this?

So, barring false positives, you must think that the issue here is with the choice of wording: "first questions". But consider that there can be multiple firsts. The English language is flexible like that.

This question is among that particular user's first questions. (Perhaps it would help, since you're a programmer, to think in terms of sets. The questions shown in that tab make up the set of a particular user's "first questions".)

And since it's among their first questions, it's likely to be in need of review, as most of us don't learn how to do something correctly after the very first time. It usually takes a couple of tries, so reporting the first few questions asked by a particular user still seems like a perfectly valid condition for this feature.

What should we "fix"? From my viewpoint, things are working just as I'd expect them to. The only thing we might consider changing is the wording on that tab. But it seems silly to go from a simple, short phrase like "first question(s)" to something longer and more elaborate for only a minimal semantic gain.

Answer 2

I was just about to ask the same question. The algorithm seems to be to pick up all questions by low-rep users, not just first questions. See for example, this user whose question from a few minutes ago just popped up in the review queue.

In my view, this is exactly how it should be and if it hadn't been the case, I would have made it a feature request to change the settings to include all questions from low-rep users.