Recently we've had our stellar diamond moderators step in the gap and close questions on the site which shouldn't be kept open for too long (mostly identification requests).
It got me to thinking - if we didn't have those diamond mods around, we wouldn't be able to get those kinds of questions closed fairly quickly.
Does anyone think that we should consider asking Stack Exchange to lower the close vote threshold to 3?
Some of you may have noticed the Meta Stack Exchange post - Testing three-vote close and reopen on 13 network sites (it's linked in the featured on meta sidebar) - we've finally got this project under way and Anime & Manga is one of the sites we'll be running the test on.
Starting tomorrow, I'll be changing the site setting and closing and reopening will require only three votes. This test will run for 45 days and will be turned back to five votes to close and reopen while I review the data from the 13 sites. After we've seen the impact, I'll be posting results and, if there aren't negative impacts, we will change the setting to three permanently.
A few weeks into this, I'll be posting a question here on meta to ask for your thoughts about this change, so you will have an opportunity to discuss the impact.
Thank you so much for your patience while we got this prioritized and scheduled. There's a lot more information in the MSE post, so please review it.
On a more specific note, I did read your answer to my MSE post and I understand your concern. This is on me. When I started this project in earnest in 2019, we were preparing to start running tests in January - and by "we" I mean Shog and I - he's written all of my queries and I'm a novice at best with SQL. And, well... he got fired - and I felt a little stuck because I wasn't sure how to pick up without his help.
Part of the delay in this is just practicality - we had only four CMs and couldn't keep up - and that's why we're finally able to get this out now - it was both prioritized and I felt like I could finally actually do it well. Because that's really important to me and I need to be able to focus on it and really analyze the data I get.
If the mods on this site are closing 98% of all questions that get closed and - even then - y'all still only have 66% of questions that get nominated to close actually handled (these are real stats for y'all)... then there is a big problem and I'm not even sure whether this will fix it. The mods here are doing a lot of great work but if there isn't a community here participating in reviewing, there's a lot bigger problem than this can fix and, well, while I hope this does help a lot, there may be more efficacious options.
One of the other reasons for the delay is that we did roll out changes to review in an attempt to get more people involved, help them understand how to review and make reviewing easier - and we didn't want to be testing two changes simultaneously.
As to not responding, that's on my plate, too. I should have - and a comment I left on the question on MSE specifically recognizes that I've been remiss in keeping people updated, though I did write an update answer on MSE to let people know what was going on in December, that wasn't necessarily visible to individual sites. I apologize for that. I struggle with giving people "bad" news ("this project is delayed") - but I'll try to work on that, too.
So, I'm very sorry about the delay in this project and the silence on my part - it is important and I want to find ways to ensure that close-worthy questions are getting closed on sites without putting a ton of pressure on moderators to do all the work.
I don't have any privs here, but here's my general thoughts on the question
If there's not a lot of active reviewers, that's a good reason to lower the threshold. The close review stats page seems to indicate there's not a lot of reviewing going on. The fact that there's two moderators in the top 10 also doesn't bode well (it typically means that moderators are cleaning out the queues because the community isn't voting enough).
A problem I noticed on DIY.SE was that a lot of votes weren't being done to completion. A lot of times, it was due to votes aging away. If this is a persistent problem, it means the voting culture needs some help.
A major reason we close questions is so you don't wind up with terrible questions you can't get rid of. Once a question gets answers, it often starts garnering upvotes and the whole process breaks down.
