There have been many direct questions "can we increase the number of close votes that we can review", but I'd like to raise the question again in a specific context: the numbers.

Over the last "little while", the number of close requests in the queue has been hovering around 8k. What this appears to tell us is that the current close-votes/person-day is keeping up with demand. That's good, because we don't want all the bad effects of people being able to do this too much.


There are 8k close votes outstanding, and we aren't making a dent.

Doesn't this mean that for a temporary period, a small increase in the number of close votes is warranted? Just enough to trend the number of close votes down, till the big backlog is solved, hopefully without introducing an unacceptable amount of the "bad stuff" that comes with unlimited voting ability.

Even as an experiment to see if it works?

To emphasise why I think this is a "different" proposal:

  • I'm proposing a small and temporary tweak to the number of close votes available

  • Since it's temporary, with the goal of getting rid of the backlog, any of the previously mentioned concerns with increasing the limit are mitigated: worst case, if they materialize, the temporary period is finished.

  • There has been an awful lost of discussion on this in the past, as you mention. You should probably at least acknowledge the issues raised in those discussions and why your experiment will not have the same issues. – psubsee2003 May 15 '15 at 10:11
  • Done? Does that cover it? – GreenAsJade May 15 '15 at 10:15
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    As mentioned before, very few people use up their close votes in the first place, so the major issue is making people participate more in closing questions rather than giving a few more votes to the handful of people trying to soak up the ocean with paper towels. – Qantas 94 Heavy May 15 '15 at 10:25
  • I've heard that said. It's hard to reconcile with the number of times peoples ask for an increase in the limit. Maybe the point is that fresh young folk like me (hah hah) will use up their limit for the greater good, and we need to tap that even if it is a few people. It doesn't matter if the majority don't use it up: increasing the limit will increase the amount of processing that those few people who really want to help with the backlog can do. Personal note: my whole motivation to get to 3000 rep was to help reduce the close backlog... – GreenAsJade May 15 '15 at 10:41
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    What steps are you suggesting to stop robo reviewers making an even bigger mess than they currently do? – Robert Longson May 15 '15 at 10:51
  • @RobertLongson An incremental change only. We just need the direction to trend downwards instead of stay static. That means we don't need to change a lot, we just need keen fresh 3000+ers to be able to do what they were motivated to do: help with the close vote backlog – GreenAsJade May 15 '15 at 10:54
  • It's no good closing trending downwards if clean up of bad review actions trends upwards, that doesn't cut down the amount of work, it just moves it around. – Robert Longson May 15 '15 at 10:55
  • Are you proposing an increase to close reviews? Or close votes? Those numbers are actually different. – psubsee2003 May 15 '15 at 10:55
  • I thought it was clear, but I can see that it's not: I meant we need to temporarily increase the number of times you can review close votes per day. – GreenAsJade May 15 '15 at 10:58

Increasing the maximum votes per day for each user will not necessarily lead to a reduction in the size of the queue. This is because the new votes may not be used up when reviewing questions in the close votes queue, but also for voting to close questions with no existing close votes, thus adding more items to be processed.

If the objective is to retain the queue length in a manageable level, one should add different thresholds for voting on question in the review queue, or outside of it. For example, if every user retains his maximum 50 votes per day for the review queue, but can only vote to close e.g. 5 questions a day, that do not have any pending close votes on them, then the queue size would likely return to a shorter equilibrium.

Whether such a change is desirable or not is questionable though, as it would potentially harm the site's quality, since now more poor questions would be left open.

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