<p>Some of you may have noticed the Meta Stack Exchange post - <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/364007/testing-three-vote-close-and-reopen-on-13-network-sites">Testing three-vote close and reopen on 13 network sites</a> (it's linked in the featured on meta sidebar) - we've finally got this project under way and Cross Validated is one of the sites we'll be running the test on.</p>
<p>Starting tomorrow, I'll be changing the site setting and closing and reopening will require only three votes. This test will run for 45 days and will be turned back to five votes to close and reopen while I review the data from the 13 sites. After we've seen the impact, I'll be posting results and, if there aren't negative impacts, we will change the setting to three permanently.</p>
<p>A few weeks into this, I'll be posting a question here on meta to ask for your thoughts about this change, so you will have an opportunity to discuss the impact.</p>
<p>Thank you so much for your patience while we got this prioritized and scheduled. There's a lot more information in the MSE post, so please review it.</p>
<hr />
<p>To address some of the specific points made</p>
<ul>
<li>Yes, this will be a symmetric change - both closing and reopening will require three votes.</li>
<li>In the interest of running a fair test, we're only going to change one variable at a time. We can discuss raising the number of reviews later but I'd want to analyze how many people are reviewing and hitting that max reviews per day frequently before doing that.</li>
<li>We've made some <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/360198/visual-design-changes-to-the-review-queues">recent changes to Review</a> in an attempt to make the review queues findable, easier to use, and understandable by people who may be new to reviewing. We've been collecting data about this change for a while.</li>
</ul>
