There's a lot of focus on the "requires editing" option. I think there's some adjustment that we could make there to the description but if we're looking at a quick fix while we're considering other options, I'd actually like to look more closely at the help text for both requires editing and unsalvageable:
- Requires Editing for questions that you can make clear and answerable by editing
- Unsalvageable for questions that cannot or should not be answered and must therefore be removed from the site
As I've been hearing about this problem, what I keep thinking is that there are two different types of editing that's needed.
- Editing for grammar, spelling, and other cleanup that can be done by any user with the interest to do so.
- Editing by the author to add additional information and details so that the question becomes answerable.
So, in a sense, we're failing to clarify who needs to edit something to be a correct usage of "requires editing". Yes, the explanation says "that you can make clear" but that's easy to misinterpret and the alternative choice is... somewhat bleak.
"Unsalvageable"... is... kinda harsh. And I can imagine that someone who is looking through these reviews might be hesitant to describe a question looking for help that way - particularly someone new to review. So, the bigger change I'm suggesting we make is to update the terminology:
Incomplete for questions that should be closed because they need more detail from the asker to be answerable or are off topic for this site and should be removed.
I'm not 100% convinced this is perfect so feel free to suggest other terms or descriptions that you feel explain the use case more accurately. My main goals here are to give users a less scary or judgemental term that will make it more likely they'll actually use it. Bonus points here for introducing the concept of closure and when questions should be closed.
We can also update requires editing to something more like:
Requires Editing for on topic, complete, answerable questions that may need minor editing to clean up formatting, grammar or other minor issues.
Again, there may be better phrasing here but I hope you can see where I'm going with this.
