One of the jobs that civic minded members are encouraged to do here is to vote on whether certain questions should be closed, need further work, or should remain open. This is only after one has accumulated enough reputation.
The review queues here are sometimes long. Not as long as EL&U's but quite long nonetheless. The queues are going to get longer and longer. EL&U can give us an idea of what's to come. Theirs are quite often in the hundreds and at one point their close-vote queue was 804 (I think it may have hit 900).
Now, when sizing up a review queue, if it's very long, it's like having too much food on your plate. It puts you off. This is related to another problem: a second thing that puts me off is that I don't think people should vote to close on subjects that they don't find interesting. Close-voting should be a task that's undertaken carefully and thoughtfully. People who aren't interested in certain subjects or types of question, won't think about them as carefully as they will about ones on subjects they care about or are interested in. Closing a question is not irreversible, but the damage done by closing a question which gets opened later is.
The reason for this is that while it's closed it is steadily dropping down the question queue, and by the time it gets reopened most users have long lost interest in it, so these questions often don't get answered properly and don't get the views and votes necessary to make the page into a good page.
I therefore steer away from questions about the meaning of words or phrases or idioms. Because I'm not interested in them, I don't think they are the best questions for me to look at and think about. I prefer questions about grammar and pronunciation.
It would be good if there was some way that I could just review grammar questions in the review queue instead of wading through lots of questions that are irrelevant to me. It gets frustrating having to press the skip button all the time. I don't want to close vote on questions I don't care about. It would also be good if we could do that for pronunciation questions for example. This would also cut our review queue duties down to size, and make the process more enjoyable and more efficient for everyone. Could we request this as some kind of feature?
Of course, I know that whatever feature is provided won't be perfect, I'll still miss some grammar questions, and I'll still have to look at some questions that aren't really about grammar.
Incidentally, it would be really useful for teachers who come on here to be able to do the same thing when browsing questions. I mean, most teachers know the meanings of words, but a lot of teachers come here to improve their grammar in particular. Is there any way that teachers can kind of filter the questions so that they don't have to wade through everything else to find the grammar questions?
By grammar, of course, what I mean is all that stuff that is published in grammar books such as the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Practical English Usage, the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Usage, Advanced Grammar in Use (and, of course the other levels). You know, that kind of thing.
Is there any chance of this happening? It might be useful for certain types of learner too! If you think this is a good idea, please upvote this post. If by any chance this already exists and you think it is a good idea, please explain what this feature is — but more importantly, please upvote this post too to ensure this feature does not disappear!
