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At present, low-rep users can not assist in finding duplicates and other questions that need closing, apart from flagging for mod attention.

However, we don’t wish low rep users to be closing questions that should not be closed!

So why not:

  • Let all users vote to close
  • Only votes from the high rep users count towards the five votes needed for an “auto close”
  • 10K+ users can see a list of all questions with lots of votes to close

(This can be thought of as a way to move work from the diamond mods to the 10K+ users)

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For duplicates the low rep users could just post a comment linking to the possible duplicate. Then high rep users can use this info to close the question. –  sth Sep 24 '10 at 12:30
"10K+ users can see a list of all questions with lots of votes to close" <-- 10k users can already view a list of the questions with the most close votes. As well as flagged questions/answers. –  Powerlord Sep 24 '10 at 14:37
@Powerlord, this includes votes from users that "don't count" as they don't have enough rep –  Ian Ringrose Sep 24 '10 at 15:31
I'm surprised this did so badly. I don't particularly like the idea of allowing < 3k voting that has no actual impact, since it adds confusion to the voting interface, but some other way for people to signal 3ks or 10ks that a question should be closed would be decent. I think there was a suggestion that another flag be added for questions that should be closed, but I don't think anything came of it –  Michael Mrozek Sep 24 '10 at 18:49
@Shog9, completed? –  jmfsg Feb 1 '12 at 2:21

3 Answers 3

up vote 5 down vote accepted

With the flag dialog redesign and exposure of standard flags to 10K users, this is effectively status-completed.

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I see what you're trying to do there, and I like the idea of getting <3k users more involved. I'm not sure that there's enough of a problem to justify a fix, though, especially one that will be as confusing as a second grade/tier of close vote.

Meta has a lot of "don't close all these questions so fast" posts, and a fair number of "why do people keep asking dupes?" questions. When was the last time you heard "too many dupes are remaining open, we need people to close more aggressively"? I can't remember one.

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How many quesions get closed as dupes after a few answers have been given and upvoted? –  Ian Ringrose Sep 24 '10 at 21:36

On high-volume sites like Stack Overflow, this really isn't necessary - the 3k+ users will see it and vote to close quickly enough (if it needs to be closed).

On lower-volume sites (i.e. SE betas) this is generally handled by flagging the post for moderator attention, if there's an egregious problem with the question that doesn't fit into the spam/offensive categories. Seems to work pretty well.

I understand what you're after, I read the last paragraph - but I think that in the cases where there are actually enough well-engaged 10k+ users to pay attention to the "almost votes", there are already more than enough 3k+ users to just close the question, so there'd be a pretty narrow use case for this.

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