Guidelines for reviewing Triage

The primary goal of Triage is to quickly sort potentially problematic questions into categories that can be routed elsewhere. On sites where the queue is large enough (e.g. Stack Overflow), consider using a filter option to only get questions within your preferred list of tags.

Here are some rules of thumb based on the review options available:

Common reasons to Skip

If you aren't sure about the suitability of the question, skip it and move on to the next one. This should be your default option: there's no penalty for skipping, and it immediately makes the question available for others to review.

Common reasons to Skip include:

• a topic which you're unfamiliar with, and the question is not blatantly unsuitable for the site
• the prose is hard to understand but not necessarily impossible to read
• extremely long and detailed, combined with either of the above

Common reasons to Flag

Use Flag for questions that are spam or rude/abusive, or questions that are closeable and cannot be salvaged by the author or others to be a good fit for the site. Follow the guidelines for reviewing Close votes to see if a question is closeable.

Common reasons to choose Needs author edit

Use Needs author edit for questions that are closeable in their current state, but which can be edited by their authors to be a good fit for the site. As an example, questions that include most required details but are missing one or more crucial details required to find an answer, such as an error log or mass of an object.

Common reasons to choose Needs community edit

Use Needs community edit only for questions that are good fits for the site but which simply require proofreading to fix grammar or formatting issues.

If you can you imagine yourself (not the post's author) editing the question to improve its current state, or another random editor with more knowledge of the specific area or more patience for proofreading posts doing so, this is the correct option. This is not the correct option to choose if the question needs an edit from the author: for that, choose Needs author edit.

Common community editing tasks include:

• Correcting substantial spelling/grammar/formatting errors
• Rewriting the title to better represent the question asked
• Retagging the question to more appropriate tags
• Incorporate key information from comments or mistaken self-answers

(These reasons are borrowed from another post.)

Common reasons to choose Looks OK

If the question is a good, on-topic question for the site, and doesn't have any issues that would need to be fixed by a fellow community editor or the author, choose Looks OK

This answer is originally from the guidelines for reviewing Triage on Meta Stack Overflow. This answer is being reposted here because Triage is now available on other network sites.