Close-vote threshold lowered to three

Question

The impetus for this question was this medical advice question which (as of the time of writing) had 3 votes to close but obviously remained open.

As longtime users of this network know, it takes 5 votes for closure to close a question. However, for a long time, Stack Overflow was the exception, requiring 3 votes to close.

Last year, an initiative happened to test the expansion of this 3 vote requirement across the network. The results were very positive, with few drawbacks noted.

In the second Q&A, Catija notes:

I'll also be using the information I have to start 3-vote close/reopen on the other sites that have requested it.

This suggests other sites can request the requirement be decreased.

While the community moderators here are very active and close most questions quickly, given how many personal medical advice questions we receive, should we request the vote requirement be decreased to 3 for Medical Sciences?

Update 9 March 2022

We appear to have reached consensus in favor of decreasing the vote requirement to 3, with at least net +5 in support (+7/-2 vs +2/-5). With the full support of each of the 3 active moderators, we will move forward with the request to the Stack Exchange team.

Update 26 May 2022

The decrease in close-vote threshold is now live. It should only take 3 votes to close a question. For those users with the privilege, please do not hesitate to make use of your newly concentrated curating ability.

Answer 1

It's been a little while since you escalated this request to the Community Team — sorry for the slight delay!

You now officially only need 3 close votes to close a question on Medical Sciences SE!

After looking at the data, I think it's clear that there's no reason for y'all to have this threshold set at 5. Thank you so much for bearing with us while we got to this request.

We'll check back in with you all in a few months to see how things are going in this regard — if things are going great, we may not post an update, but please feel free to leave a comment here if you want us to post something.

---

Here are some basic stats on how things looked before this change:

Over the last two years, you've had decent numbers when looking into what percentage of questions that received at least one flag or vote to close actually ended up getting closed. While there are some dips here and there (the one in late 2021 is particularly noticeable), things have been generally in the 70-90% range, and the numbers of posts this represents are relatively small.

However, the graph below shows that the site moderators, rather than the community, are doing the bulk of the closing:

The graph above may look a bit confusing, because it has six different possible lines, but only the All_Closed line is visible for most of it. This is because almost all of the questions that have been closed (including all of the questions closed in the last few months) have been closed by mods; very few questions have been closed without mod intervention. (The lines for reopened questions are all near the bottom – not very many closed questions get reopened on this site, which is not particularly uncommon.)

When working on this project, Catija (another CM) had 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

Both of these are valid concerns here, to a degree. The first graph still shows that there are around ~15-20% of tasks aging out of the review queue on any given month.

Likewise, the second graph shows that the site mods here are casting the bulk of the final close votes. However, the mods shouldn't be having to make the vast majority of these decisions – even with other users weighing in. This creates an imbalance between closing and reopening, as the mods have to be really thoughtful about reviewing for reopening.

However, the main reason for the latter seems to be that there are very few non-moderators around who can cast close/reopen votes. Only users with at least 500 rep can cast close/reopen votes on the Medical Sciences site. There are actually a total of 80 users who have enough reputation to have this privilege, but less than 5 have been active on the site in the past week (only a dozen in the past month) – and that's including the site mods!

Basically, there’s no reason not to lower the close vote threshold on this site, which is why we've done so – but mods will still probably have to participate in a lot of the closing because there are so few users that can vote to close. Our hope is that lowering the close vote threshold to 3 for Medical Sciences SE can ease the load on the mods at least a little, but more regular users with the privilege need to participate in closures for that to happen.

Answer 2

Yes, we should. The reasons for this change include:

• Vanishingly few questions here are closed by the community gathering 5 votes without a moderator being involved, as can be seen in the latest statistics: 2021: a year in moderation
• Low-quality or off-topic questions will hopefully be closed faster. This will decrease the effort the community spends on such questions or encourage the question author to revise the question while they are most likely to remain invested in it.
• With 5 votes to close, votes tend to age away (invalidate themselves) making their voting useless, leading to voter apathy. Lowering the vote threshold will reduce the number of votes aging away.
• Lowering the vote threshold will hopefully encourage more users who have earned the privilege to actually use it. This in turn will show new question authors that their question closure is the product of community consensus rather than the unilateral action of a community ♦️ moderator.

Answer 3

No, we shouldn't. The reasons for this include:

• Carey Gregory has said it himself: "There are barely 5 high-rep users who are active and who can cast these votes". We cannot reduce the number of required close-voters to three, if there's barely more than three people voting in the first place. The bullet point written by Bryan Krause speaks to this:

• "A reason given by opponents of this change on Biology.SE was concern that a small group of opinionated close voters would have too much control over the questions that are kept open."

• The reduced number of required close-voters was indeed set on StackOverflow, but StackOverflow has no shortage of close-voters: Their problem is the humungous volume of questions they get (5.4k questions/day at the moment). I don't believe reducing the number of required close-voters should be used as a substitute when high-rep users are not close voting.

• Catija's post about this topic, linked in the Meta question that we're currently answering, said: "When five people are needed for this process, it puts more weight on more people to do the work and, with a relatively low number of reviews per day per person, the small crew of reviewers can become quickly overwhelmed even if they are actively reviewing posts. Reducing this number to three quickly leaves this group more room to act on more different tasks." But at only 3 questions/day, none of this applies here. As someone who performs reviews and acts on hundreds of questions network-wide per day, I find it hard to imagine that anyone is "burned out" by reviewing on a site with 3 questions/day.

• Catija's post also says that while reducing the required number of close voters to 3 worked on SO which is pretty much the polar opposite of Medical Sciences in terms of activity, for the smaller sites involved in the experiment: "On Web Applications and Hardware Recommendations much of the closing is still done by moderators, even on Hardware Recs, where they only need one user to vote to close. There still has to be a community willing to do the work for this to help - the site won't need five people but they will still need three or else there will still be low percentage of review completion or moderators will still need to do a lot of the work."

• Most questions here are hammered closed by a diamond mod unilaterally (or with one other close voter) anyway, so decreasing the number of required close voters down from 5 to 3 will not make much of a difference. Maybe you should ask the company if they are willing to reduce it down to 2, but that I think that would be a bit silly.