Reducing Close/Reopen vote threshold from 5 to 3

Question

Is the Robotics community interested in having the Close and Reopen vote threshold lowered to 3, rather than the standard 5. They made this change permanent on Stack Overflow and it has been working well for them.

If anything, it would be more valuable as a change here, since we have so few people actively voting to close and reopen questions. At the moment, there are fewer than 100 people who have the 500 rep currently needed to cast close and reopen votes and few people are exercising that privilege. I very rarely see more than one vote to close on a post before I deal with it, and frequently need to use the other review queues to find questions which should be closed, as they simply haven't attracted any close votes.

If there is a consensus that we should do this, then I will make a request for the threshold to be changed.

Answer 1

You officially have three vote close here on Robotics!

I've looked at the data and it's clear that there's no reason for y'all to have this set at 5. Thank you so much for your patience while we got to this request.

Here's what I've seen - I'll check back in with you all in a few months to see how things are going - if things are going great, I may not post an update but please feel free leave a comment if you want me to post something.

Here's some basic stats of how things look:

Over the last year and a half, you've had decent numbers when looking into what percentage of questions that received at least one flag or vote to close getting closed in the end. While there was a dip in May 2021, things have been generally in the 60-100% range and, the numbers of posts this represents are relatively small.

If this were the full story, I wouldn't normally consider it but when you look at this graph, things become more concerning:

The graph above may seem odd because it has six different possible lines and only the All_Closed and a single blip on All_Reopened - The latter is because y'all don't reopen a lot of questions, which is not particularly uncommon. But where's the Moderators_Closed and Community_Closed lines? - well, the former is identical to the All_Closed and the latter is hidden in the pile of zeroes at the bottom.

Here are the last few months:

OnDate	Moderators_ Closed	Moderators_ Reopened	Community_ Closed	Community_ Reopened	All_Closed	All_ Reopened
2021-11-01 00:00:00	10	0	0	0	10	0
2021-12-01 00:00:00	11	0	0	0	11	0
2022-01-01 00:00:00	29	1	0	0	29	1
2022-02-01 00:00:00	12	0	0	0	12	0
2022-03-01 00:00:00	7	0	0	0	7	0
2022-04-01 00:00:00	4	0	0	0	4	0

When working on this project, I found two primary use cases for this change

1. When too many items are going unhandled (not unclosed, just unhandled)
2. When the moderators are doing the bulk of the closing/reopening.

Because the mods here are casting the bulk of the final close votes, the first looks good but the mods shouldn't be making these decisions - even with other users weighing in. This creates an imbalance between closing and reopening as the mods now have to be really thoughtful about reviewing for reopening.

So, my hope is that changing this to three votes to close/reopen will take some of the workload off the mods and also increase the number of posts that find their way to be reopened - assuming it's worth reopening them!

Answer 2

I agree. I think 3 makes more sense for our community.

Answer 3

Wanted to bump this. There's a question now sitting at 4 votes, which seems like a lot, but I think 5 is probably nearly impossible unless it's just outright spam or inappropriate, given the size of our site.