I recently got the privilege to review questions in Triage, and I'm pretty sure I'm already doing it wrong.
I've read some of the Q&A about the Triage review queue here on Meta, but I was wondering if there is a guide explaining how it works and how I should be reviewing.
What do the four review options mean, what should I do if I'm unsure what action to take, and how many Triage reviews can I perform per day?
What should I do if I make mistakes? Is there any recourse?
The primary goal of Triage is to quickly sort potentially problematic posts into categories that can be routed elsewhere. These are questions that were given a low quality score by the system or were flagged as Very low quality by users. Many people have expressed confusion over how to use Triage, as the queue has evolved considerably over time.
Here are some rules of thumb based on the review options available:
If you aren't sure what should happen to a question, skip it and move on to the next one. This should be your default option: there's no penalty for skipping, and it immediately makes the question available for others to review, so if you don't think you can make a good decision quickly (within, say, a minute), skip it!
Common reasons to click Skip include:
Remember: There is no shame in using "Skip"!
Use Flag for incomplete and/or off-topic questions which should be closed.
Is it spam? A rant about nothing productive? The output of someone's cat dancing merrily across their keyboard? Not in English? Easy enough: choose Flag, and flag or vote to close appropriately. (Once you gain the privilege to vote to close questions, some of the options become votes instead of flags, but the UI doesn't change much.)
Of course, if you think it's the work of a cat but suspect it might actually be a valid Perl regex that got mistagged somehow... Skip, so someone else can have a look.
Even questions that aren't blatantly inappropriate for the site can still be reviewed as Flag if there's simply no way they can generate a useful answer. Usually, judging these questions will require at least some basic knowledge of the technologies involved though, and you'll want to read the question carefully — the good folk answering Ruby questions won't appreciate you flagging stuff simply because all the Gem names appear to have been produced from a set of rather twee Markov chains. Again, if you're not sure, hit Skip!
You should Flag a question for any reason you would flag a question. These include, but are not limited to:
The last four deserve a note: if a question is definitely off-topic for Stack Overflow but is quite well-written and on-topic for another Stack Exchange site (including an international Stack Overflow site), you can flag/vote for migration using Flag → off-topic → belongs on another site (or a "looked at by a moderator" flag if the necessary site isn't in the list of sites). Alternatively, just leave a comment noting the existence of the appropriate site and close as off-topic.
Use Needs community edit only for complete and on-topic questions which simply require a cleanup.
Can you imagine someone other than the post's author editing the question to improve its current state, such as yourself? How about some other random editor with more knowledge of the specific area, or more patience for lousy writing, or both?
If you don't know whether the question can be fixed by editing alone — perhaps you've never worked with the technologies involved and simply can't tell if it's a reasonable question for topic-experts — then Skip; there are other questions that need your attention more.
If you're sure that this question can be fixed through community editing alone (see also Addendum: Recovery of a bad review below), then hit Needs community edit. This adds it to the First questions review queue, allowing other editors to find and improve it.
Note that for this button, you should only consider information that is present in the question as text; don't count information that's in images or links. See Reasons for NOT choosing Needs community edit below.
(These reasons are borrowed from another post.)
Do not choose Needs community edit if you know the question can only be made answerable with clarifications or additions from its author. The correct option for that is Needs author edit (see below).
For example, if an android question asks for an explanation of errors found in LogCat, but omits specific errors and/or LogCat listing, the question doesn't require community editing — it requires more information from the author, so choose Needs author edit → Needs details or clarity or A community-specific reason → Needs debugging details.
A question is also Needs author edit if the code, error message, or other crucial information is only present as an image (or image link). It's the author's and not the editor's job to include all relevant information as text. The same applies to questions which link to code repositories without including the critical code sections or a Minimal, Reproducible Example in their post. Images and links should only ever serve as references or enhancements of what's already being stated completely as text in the question's description.
First, there's a bit of a special case here: duplicates. A clear, well-written question might still be a duplicate, and the last thing you want to do is to dispute duplicate flags by choosing Looks OK if it is a duplicate. As such, always read the comments first: scroll to the end of the question, and if you see "This question is similar to" in the list, first, confirm that the comment is accurate and that the question is answered in the link, then if so, either Flag the post as a duplicate or choose Needs community edit if the author has provided some differentiation in the comments but hasn't edited the question; choose Looks OK only if you're certain the question is not a duplicate. As always, Skip is a fine option here if you simply don't want to take the time to look at duplicates.
If the question is clear, well-written, meets the site's guidelines, and is not a duplicate, hit Looks OK. If you're the third person to choose this option, you'll get the chance to vote on the question following your review — go ahead and do so! (You can always vote by clicking through to the normal question page of course, but since exceptionally good questions are so rare that Triage gives you a chance to do this without leaving the queue).
If it's a halfway decent question but not amazing, or if some editing would be nice to clean up some minor errors or rough spots but is understandable without editing, just hit Looks OK and proceed to the next question without voting.
If it's kind of a boring or useless question but it doesn't really need to be closed or deleted, hit Looks OK (and consider downvoting if you're the third reviewer).
Use Needs author edit for questions that need more information or clarity from the author.
This option works exactly the same as the Flag button, but makes it much clearer that the question is otherwise suitable for the site were it to include additional information or clarity from the author.
Choose Needs author edit if:
The limit of 20 reviews per day per queue is common to all review queues on all sites and does not change with reputation, time spent on site, badges, helpful flags, review counts, audit pass rates, or much of anything except the queue overflowing: if there are more than 150 reviews backlogged, all reviewers will have 40 reviews/day in that queue. (♦ moderators do not have review limits.)
You had too much coffee, you finger twitched, and by mistake you wrongly clicked on the Needs community edit or Looks OK buttons when you actually wanted to click on the Flag or Needs author edit buttons and submitted before you could notice. What can you do?