UPDATE:
Thanks for participating in this test! I'll look at the info and see how it went.
In the interim, if you have any feedback you'd like to give, there's a place for that here:
Feedback request - What are your thoughts on three-vote closure?
We regret to inform that due to insufficient nominating candidates, we are currently terminating the ongoing election here on Web Applications. Thank you to Rubén for having stood up as a candidate in this session. However, as explained previously, in order for an election to proceed to voting phases it is required that there is at least one more candidate than there are spaces remaining in the election.
This is important for a variety of reasons. The first is that it allows the election process to proceed in a way that allows candidates to be evaluated before being elected. It also serves to indicate that there are enough people in the community who are willing to handle the responsibilities of overseeing moderation.
When this election went into overtime and then failed, I started thinking about why we were hosting an election here at all. There's already five great mods of varying activity levels and, to be quite honest, not a huge burden of flags for them to handle. This is a great community with not a lot of drama going on - congrats for that!
So, you might ask, why were we hosting an election? For help with closing questions.
If you're thinking "But, mods aren't really here to close questions, they're supposed to be handling flags..." you'd be right! We don't generally expect our mods to put in large amounts of time clearing the close queue - and yet they are on this site.
This site has a reasonable number of people eligible to vote to close - ~25 active in the last 30 days - but many people aren't choosing to do so. This isn't unexpected. Reviewing is hard work and can be drudgery, particularly when queues are long and the effectiveness of any one vote to close seems questionable.
Of the 177 questions closed in July, 169 were closed with the help of a moderator and only eight were closed by users alone. The median number of votes needed to close a question is four.
So, on the tails of the successful Hardware Recommendations test of single-vote closure and the current three-vote closure on Stack Overflow, I'm going to propose that, rather than a new moderator, we test lowering the number of votes needed to close and reopen a question to three.
Here's what I'm hoping to see:
- more questions are closed by users (no diamond moderators involved)
- more questions are reopened by users (no diamond moderators involved)
- fewer than 1% of closed questions go through more than two close/reopen cycles
So, starting today, we'll be dropping the number of votes required to close a question to three. In 30 days we'll set it back to the default and assess the impact. If this is a success, we can return to the three votes needed after the assessment is complete and some discussion about it happens.
As to the election, if this test is a success and the moderators feel like they're able to manage their workload, we'll cancel the election for the time being.
