Guidelines for reviewing Reopen votes

The items in the Reopen votes queue may take more time to process than other queues. If a question is in the queue, either community members disagreed with the closure and voted to reopen, or a user has edited the question to address the close reason, so you will need to understand and evaluate the contention.

Basic workflow

Review the question as it is now.

• Per the Guidelines for reviewing Close votes, should the question remain closed? In short, does any one of the five close reasons - duplicate, community-specific, needs details or clarity, needs more focus, or opinion-based - still apply? If so, click Leave closed and specify whether the original reason it was closed with still applies or which other close reason applies.
• If not, click Reopen.
• If one of the close reasons still applies, but you can edit the post so that none of them apply, click Edit and reopen. (Unlike similar "Edit" options in other review queues, this action is not unilateral; this will count as a normal "Reopen" review once completed.)
  • On sites with "beta" reputation requirements, if you have enough reputation to vote to close but not enough to make edits, your edit will be submitted as a suggested edit. Other reviewers will not see your edit until it is approved.
• If you aren't sure, Skip.

Keep in mind there was some contention. Either someone felt the close votes were misguided and voted to reopen, or someone attempted to improve the question and make it passable. If the post is edited after it was closed, it might cause the review to show the edits that took place, in order to make it clearer what was improved. Be sure to review the whole question itself, not just the edit (see the third tip below).

It will happen often that you are unsure what to do with a question appearing in this queue. Bear in mind these questions are difficult for everyone to evaluate, so we encourage you to take the time to research the question more rather than "Skip" the harder ones. The following questions may help your decision:

• Do you see why someone voted to reopen the question? Understanding the reason can make you feel surer you considered all angles and are not "missing something." The reopen voter may have left a comment indicating why they voted.
• Has the question's content changed in an effort to improve it since then?

If "yes" to the second, but you still feel the question should remain closed, please consider leaving a comment explaining why the changes were insufficient. In many cases, the author or an editor sincerely evaluated the content and tried to improve it to the best of their ability, and seeing the question left closed in review will likely not help them learn our standards or how to improve the question. While the system will show the reason you and/or other reviewers selected for leaving closed, it's often useful to give additional details in a comment (i.e., why the edits failed to completely address the original close reason or why another close reason applies to the edited version).

Tips for evaluating items in the Reopen Queue

• Do check the close reason to understand why the question was closed in the first place.

  When one's question is closed, the author gets a message to edit their post to make it fit within site guidelines, or to clarify why it's not a duplicate of the target question, so this may have occurred.

• Do read the comments.

  Often the reason why the post was closed or is getting a reopen vote is listed in the comments, and that can help you understand what the community is trying to do with the question, and help you make a more informed decision.

• Don't just review the edit, if an edit is shown.

  If the post is edited after being closed, the system might show you just the edits that took place after closure, rather than the whole post itself. Sometimes these edits might just be minor, not affecting the acceptability of the question but simply making grammar or formatting fixes. Don't just review them as Leave closed just because the edit is minor; it might be possible that the closure wasn't warranted in the first place, or that the post can be edited to be reopenable. Be sure to evaluate the question itself, not just the edit, before selecting that the original close reason was not resolved.

• Don't vote to reopen items that should be closed, but were closed with the wrong close reason (unless it should instead be closed as a duplicate).

  If the item should have been closed, leave it closed, regardless of what the actual close reason says. Same goes if later edits address the given close reason, but a different one also applies or begins to apply. Again, when reviewing to leave closed, there is an option to specify which other close reason applies (if the given one doesn't still apply). See also the above paragraph on leaving comments in case you still feel the question should be closed.

  Note, however, that if the duplicate close reason applies and none of the others do, and the question is currently closed for one of the other reasons, do vote to reopen the question (and then later re-close it as a duplicate), because we would rather future visitors be routed to the correct answer than be stuck. While the dialog for reasons for leaving closed does have an option that the question is a duplicate, it doesn't have any option to indicate a duplicate target and so the notice will not serve visitors to the question with a clear direction to the answer.

  If the question is closed as a duplicate but is instead a duplicate of a different question from the one specified, review as Leave closed and flag for a moderator or ping a gold-badge user to have the duplicate target changed. In this case, do use the duplicate option in the reason dialog.