I'm working on that last queue that we'll be adding to /review as part of the quality project, and it's arguably the most interesting piece of the puzzle.
It's a queue where folks that are interested in helping (mostly) new users can go to work on questions that the community has deemed likely to be valuable, but in need of some improvement before they can become lasting artifacts on the site. These are the questions that were sorted as 'should be improved' from the new triage queue.
The scope of what you can do in this new queue still hasn't settled, but editing is going to be a major part of it. One of the best ways you can help someone new to the site that asks what could be an interesting question is to edit it for them, and let them know why you changed what you did in the summary. This new queue will very strongly suggest substantive edits, since the questions that land in it have been marked by multiple users as needing some help.
Speaking to that, I'd like to get some feedback from anyone that has spent time editing. Once you're in the editor, what can cause you to abandon your edit? From experience, and the limited reasons I can infer, the following things can cause it:
- Turns out, you just don't have enough time.
- There's not enough information given - you can't really improve it without a missing piece, but you didn't realize it was missing when you started.
- You had a thought on how you were going to edit when you clicked the button, but it escaped you once the editor loaded. You just can't make sense of it after all.
- As you started cleaning things up, you realize it's a duplicate, and went to find the duplicate instead.
- You just lose enthusiasm somehow. Maybe it was more work than you thought it would be. Maybe it turned out to not be that great of a question after all; the cost-to-reward ratio just didn't pan out.
Editing can be funny that way, you often don't know what you've bitten off until you've chewed it for a bit.
Even if you closely identify with one of the reasons I've listed, I'd like to hear from you. Any narrative you care to share will help lend insight into (1) the selection process for what gets shown to you first when you enter the queue and (2) ways that the system can possibly alleviate some of the common pains that editors feel.
Your responses will help us put together an interface for the queue that gets out of your way as you help gems 'in the rough' take on a shine, while making sure the tools we provide you for doing that are extremely optimized for your time.
This post is part of the Stack Exchange quality project (More on MSO | More on MSE)
