The close vote in review queue is meant to be cast judiciously

Question

Is it just my impression, or are some folks (blindly) closing every single question that appears in the Close Votes review queue?

https://english.stackexchange.com/review/close/history (Note only users with 10k rep will see a site-wide history, users with less will see only their own)

We can also cast our vote to keep a question open.

---

For example, How would I describe this situation on a CV/to an interviewer? was recently closed for being POB, well you might as well close 70-90% of all SWRs. But wait, that question wasn't a guessing game; it had context, it supplied a possible solution, a good sample sentence, it followed all the guidelines to a T. But only one user voted to keep it open in the review queue.

It's a community, and we do not necessarily have to agree on everything. I'm not saying the users who cast their close votes were wrong to do so. I'm just saying. to anyone who wants to listen, if a question isn't shockingly low quality, consider casting a vote to keep it open.

Answer 1

Perhaps some review queue reviewers who feel that the site is overrun with cruddy questions are loath to waste any of their allotted 20 daily review votes on keeping acceptable questions open, since doing so would mean having fewer votes left to close unacceptable questions with. If so, they may be inclined to skip questions that, if they had unlimited votes to cast every day, they might vote to keep open. The result would be a voting record that skewed strongly toward close votes.

My review voting record looks injudicious in the opposite direction, but it isn't because I skip questions that I would vote to close if I had unlimited votes. In many instances I enter the close vote queue because I want to defend a particular question that someone has nominated for closure. So I go to the close vote queue to look for it—which means wading through a bunch of questions that I don't care about one way or the other, as well as through some that were nominated for reasons that I oppose on philosophical grounds ("lack of research effort" or "general reference") and a few that are under scrutiny for what I consider to be valid close reasons (true duplicates and questions of no interest to anyone but the poster) until I reach the one I really care about.

I usually skip most of the questions along the way—and very rarely expend all of my day's votes. But occasionally I find myself on a slippery slope where one question nominated (wrongly, in my view) for closure leads to another and another and another, and I end up voting to keep open even some questions that I would normally just skip. But if that's a problem and if the powers that be ever want to sharply reduce my participation in the close vote review queue, all they have to do is add a "keep open" option next to 'share', 'edit', 'close', and 'flag' beneath individual questions.

Answer 2

It's much less bad than you can see in your view. Moderators can also see which reviews were deliberately skipped.

I can't tell you specifics, but on average for every two or three entries you do see, there's another you aren't seeing where the reviewer has deliberately passed on a review decision because they've elected to skip it.

Answer 3

If I am working through a queue, it is precisely because I am judicious that you'll see four closevotes from me in three seconds. It's because I haven't looked at four questions in three seconds, I've looked at twelve and skipped eight, in some cases merely because they had more than two lines of text in it.

I do not labor in the queues; I swipe the low-hanging fruit. If one wishes to plod sequentially through the list, one is free to do so, but I have encountered no such expectation, and will demur. We the low-hanging fruit swipers are in the queue for a minute here, two minutes there while we're waiting for an upload or for our boss to get off the phone. I choose to spend that time voting on obvious cases rather than mulling improvements to a few questionable ones. I am not a moderator, and as a community member, this is a more efficient way to contribute now that the queues have gotten under control.

It would be better if we were given better tools to triage— to see all the questions with closevotes listed at once, to be able to return to a question after we have skipped it. Alas, the powers that be have seen fit to give us only a skip button. Skip I shall.

There are questions that are obvious keep-opens. Maybe I sense that conventional references will fail, or that a non-native will find them more interesting than I do, and those I do vote to keep open. It just happens that they are far rarer than the obvious duplicates, bizarre rants, and unsalvageable wrecks in the queue that can be identified in under a second.

Answer 4

One small factor to remember is that while four or five close votes are often needed to take a question out of the queue, only three keep open votes are needed. So even if the queue was balanced with questions that should be closed vs those which should be kept open, there would be more close votes. But of course most good questions never appear in the queue so it is far from evenly split.

When I don't visit the queue for a few days I've often come back to it and almost all of the twenty reviews it gives me are questions which already have four close votes, and if I choose to close vote then that makes five. Because of the current backlog if you visit the queue less than daily this will be a common occurrence. Such times would make my review history look especially suspect, but I'd assume that several questions reached the three keep open vote threshold in the days when I didn't visit.