62

I was just reviewing a few posts in a row in Triage that all (hopefully) got sent to the Help and Improvement review queue and was annoyed to realize that, in the time it took to determine that I should hit Should Be Improved, I had already figured out the basics of what would need to be done to fix the question. Well, really I was annoyed that this understanding was wasted as soon as I finished the review.

So what if it wasn't wasted? What if we had a special comment/summary/whatever field to be entered upon hitting Requires Editing? This field should only be displayed to Help and Improvement reviewers and would presumably be optional. As a bonus, the additional friction/required thought would doubtless reduce the number of thoughtless queue entries by some small but non-zero amount, which can only be helpful at this stage. And, of course, Help and Improvement reviewers would have a better idea what they should at least start with; sometimes it's not really obvious why Triage pushed things in (and if there's no good reason, hit the VLQ link!).

It would not be very useful to be limited only to a predefined list, since often you'd want to say "rephrase X in terms of Y" or similarly specific instructions, but showing previous reviewers' comments/instructions in the dialog and letting you agree with them would almost certainly be of value, and from there it's just a small step to having a list as a starting point that can then be added to.

As a further refinement, these special comments (at least if only one was chosen) could be used to pre-populate the summary/comment field in Help and Improvement for the reviewer to tweak before finishing their edit. ("Did I actually fix that like this comment I'm about to post says I should and did?")

6
  • 8
    This might make reviewing in H&I easier, as well: I haven't done a lot of reviewing there, but when I have I've sometimes wondered why the stuff that's there is there. Annotations from those voting to add to H&I might aid the people trying to do the Helping and Improving.
    – jscs
    Commented May 21, 2015 at 5:01
  • @JoshCaswell: Yes, I should probably have specifically mentioned that; I am sometimes careless in assuming others will see the second- or third-order benefits that will result from something. Commented May 21, 2015 at 5:03
  • If this was to happen it would be nice if there was a selection of canned responses for very common issues. Something like Code needs formatting, Spelling / Grammar needs improvement. Commented May 21, 2015 at 16:44
  • 2
    @NathanOliver, I could add those to the list I tacked on as an afterthought. However, I think only questions with really substantial spelling or grammar errors, or really painfully unformatted code, would belong in H&I, so making sure the predefined options don't lead people to throw posts in just because they misspelled one word seems wise. Commented May 21, 2015 at 16:48
  • I also feel that there is a large misunderstanding of triage reviewers. The should be improved seems to imply other things than clarity and stuff like that.
    – Zizouz212
    Commented May 22, 2015 at 2:44
  • 2
    I support this. The triage reviewer spends some time analysing the post and its problems. Currently the H&I reviewer has to repeat all the analysis thus wasting time and effort.
    – AdrianHHH
    Commented Dec 1, 2015 at 9:24

1 Answer 1

43

A more fleshed-out list of predefined options to start with:

What edits does this question require before it can be readily answered?

  • Overhaul its substantial spelling/grammar/formatting errors
  • Rewrite the title to represent the core of the problem
  • Remove useless and mistaken tags and add crucial, relevant tags
  • Incorporate important information from comments
  • Other (add a summary explaining what reviewers should focus on):

Unusually, I think this should be a list of checkboxes, not option buttons.

1

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .