Discussion between gnat and Shai

10:32 AM

4

Q: Automatically filter the Close Votes review queue to active tags for newbies

I am a little puzzled over this subject. Why does the number of items in the "close votes review queue" is always increasing? Compared to "suggested edits" - there are fewer items in the close votes queue (less than a 1M all-time close items vs. over 2M all-time items in the suggested edits). S...

gnat

simple math: there are "300 freaking easy golden badges that could drain 40,000 items from the queue in less than a month, and... 10,000 eligible users..." It looks like currently, SE team has good reasons to keep poor usability of this queue and no good reasons to improve it

@CodyGray badges are already there. There is just no interest in these among 10,000 eligible users, guess why?

Shai

@CodyGray I'm not sure I follow your math: AFAIK it takes 5 to review a close vote and 3 to review an edit (minimum), yet the system was able to process far more edit reviews (~x2)...

gnat

@CodyGray obviously, you miss the fact that number of badges is limited only by the size of a queue; as long as there are few thousands items there, badges are all there. Once again, guess why there's so little interest in these? Last time I checked there were only 1-2 CV Steward badges awarded a day - why do you think this is so?

the game as you call it, is about thinking rather than guessing: " why do you think this is so?"

Shai

@CodyGray Amen for that!

gnat

I think you are right here. Next question one could ask is, why SE team appears to ignore all the suggestions to improve that horrible UI and UX? (per my observations, various suggestions on that pop up at meta once or twice every month). Note I am not talking about resources matters, "thanks we're busy now but we'll consider it later". It looks more like these requests are just ignored "it's ok as-is"

Shai

10:32 AM

@gnat - I agree with you. What can we do about it? will starting a bounty on this question do any good?

gnat

@Shai hard to tell. So far I haven't seen bounties on questions about improving queue UI / UX have any effect. Actually, that's what made me think, what if SE team simply have their reasons to keep it poor? Upon pondering a bit, I figured that this is quite likely the case, however surprising it sounds. To find out why could that be, one may ask self a question, what would happen when (if) this queue becomes as short as other queues?

Shai

@gnat excellent point you made there! It is crucial to have no backlog on close vote to significantly improve the quality of posts in SO!

gnat

well, there you see the cool picture of bright brave new world, right. Now, if you look closer into it, you might notice some... er dark shades lurking around. Think of it. Imagine for example, you post a good question, okay. Then, imagine a complete stranger flagging your question for closure, pushing it into queue where 5 reviewers bandwagon and cast close votes. Imagine this happening in a matter of minutes or even seconds, how's that? By the way...

...note how this risk is "hedged" in other queues that seem to be otherwise similar. Troublesome edit suggestions or answers to wrongly reopened questions bump the impacted post, making it easier to catch and correct review errors when these happen. In close queue, there's nothing like that. Right or wrong, closed question is buried, and there is a huge chance that no one notices. "Do you think that it's gonna be all-right?"

Shai

@gnat closed questions can be reopened (this queue seems to work fine). So, If I posted a bad question, SNAP, it gets closed. No worries, I can edit it and make it better - sending it to the reopen queue giving it an extra chance.

gnat

@Shai that's right, reopen is supposed to handle incorrect closures the way you describe. The question is, who is going to "nominate" question for reopen. If it has been posted by an inexperienced newcomer and closed within minutes / seconds, there's a huge chance no one will, that's the problem. Note for comparison how it works differently for incorrect "bandwagon" reopens...

...no matter who posted the question, no matter who voted / reviewed to reopen, the issue gets "guaranteed" eyeballs when incorrectly reopened question gets bumped by an answer. That way is stable: no matter what, if things go wrong, there's bump and additional chances to catch it. With closures, things are different

If a tree falls in a forest

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" is a philosophical thought experiment that raises questions regarding observation and knowledge of reality. History Philosopher George Berkeley, in his work, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), proposes, "But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park [...] and nobody by to perceive them. [...] The objects of sense exist only when they are perceived; the trees therefore are in the garden [...] no longer than while there ...

sure if it's mine or your question incorrectly closed like that, we would know what to do, how to fix things and where to flag / complain. but I am talking about questions posted by inexperienced newcomers, who typically don't know the ropes

gnat

11:37 AM

to avoid misunderstanding, I am not defending poor usability of CV queue. Merely try to explain to myself why SE team would want to keep it that way

Shai

11:59 AM

I don;t know the ropes too well either. I believe that even a new user may edit his/her own post even if it was closed. In that case the post is sent to the reopen review queue. Is that right? In that case, I see no harm in prompt closing...

It simply feels very wrong when a review queue is ~65K full and increasing... Something is not working as it should...

I need to go now. I'll try and continue this chat tomorrow. Thank you for your thoughts and input on this matter.

gnat

1:24 PM

@Shai they may, right, but for a newcomers, it is only reasonable to assume they aren't aware of that

gnat

2:07 PM

@Shai it feels wrong until you start asking self questions, trying to figure what's exactly wrong about that. I did that and... you know, nothing -concrete_ seems to be really wrong. Let's see...

1. Meta complaints. Not an issue as of now. There are a couple of convenient dupe targets established, which allow to easily sweep things under the carpet

5

A: How to tag questions related to size of Close Votes review queue at Stack Overflow?

Yes, that is exactly the tagging method you should use. The review tag indicates you're talking about review, the vote-to-close tag isolates that to just the Close Votes queue, and the stackoverflow tag would isolate that even further to just the Close Votes queue on Stack Overflow. Plus you stil...

2. Frustration of several active CV-reviewers. Not an issue, if you take into account that there are 10,000 eligible users at SO to replace frustrated and disappointed ones

3. Large queue. Not an issue: there is always an option to introduce automated filtering that would allow to drain it in about 2-3 months, as already proven by experience of several reviewers who manually filter the queue

4. ...what else? You know, any concrete "issue" I considered, turned out not quite critical upon closer inspection

That's basically what I meant saying "no good reasons to improve"...

4 hours ago, by gnat

simple math: there are "300 freaking easy golden badges that could drain 40,000 items from the queue in less than a month, and... 10,000 eligible users..." It looks like currently, SE team has good reasons to keep poor usability of this queue and no good reasons to improve it

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Discussion between gnat and Shai