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We're using the "Citation Needed" notices a lot since they were introduced, but there is no really efficient workflow for removing them later. We rely pretty much on the community to flag posts that either addressed the issue and should have the notice removed, or that didn't address the issue and should be deleted.

There is a list of annotated post, but that is far from perfect as it doesn't distinguish between different kind of notices and it can't filter out according to date. We need to give the user a reasonable amount of time to address the issue before deleting.

I propose to add a new queue for older posts with a "Citation Needed" banner. Older would be something like 14 days. The possible actions in the queue would be

  • Edit (to add citations)
  • Remove banner (citations were added already)
  • Delete post

This would also mean that notice removal (and maybe also banner addition) should be put into the hands of the community, maybe something like three users need to agree to put up or remove a notice.

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  • This should probably go to meta.SO though :-)
    – Sklivvz
    Oct 18, 2012 at 20:06
  • 1
    @Sklivvz It is specific to our site, most other sites don't delete uncited posts
    – Mad Scientist Mod
    Oct 18, 2012 at 20:08
  • It is not specific to our site, it is specific to any site that uses banners extensively (banners are a shared feature and the queue should also be a shared feature, IMHO).
    – Sklivvz
    Oct 18, 2012 at 21:28
  • Given the mixed results of the effectiveness of the review queues this might not have the intended effect.
    – Ryathal
    Oct 19, 2012 at 17:54
  • It's perfectly fine to put general feature requests on a per-site meta, @Sklivvz. The devs do read all the metas. And at least one SE employee (I think it was Anna Leer) has said she doesn't like seeing the "take it to MSO" comments.
    – TRiG
    Jun 5, 2013 at 17:29
  • Biblical Hermeneutics also uses this annotation and would benefit from this feature.
    – Monica Cellio
    Jun 12, 2013 at 15:15
  • I know this is old, but who would this be for? At what rep level? How is this different than the delete queues already given to 10k+ users?
    – fredsbend
    Jan 20, 2019 at 15:20

1 Answer 1

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While I agree with this proposal, the problem is it's been over five years and nothing's changed. That's why I'm going to give an answer for what you can do right now to help review posts with post notices.

You can find all non-deleted answers with notices by searching hasnotice:yes is:a. Because this uses the regular search feature, you have different options to sort by and you can do things like search by tag. (And mods even have the option to search deleted posts with deleted:1.) Unfortunately, it's not possible to search for only posts with the "citation needed" banner this way.

Alternatively, you can use SEDE for this. Unlike regular search, this can distinguish between different types of post notice. A simple query that finds all posts with an unremoved "citation needed" banner is:

Select postid as [Post Link] from postnotices 
where postnoticetypeid = '1' and deletiondate is null

If it just shows a number and not a link, it means the answer is deleted. This query could be changed to filter and sort in any number of ways.

Of course, either of these solutions will still require someone going through the list to see if anything new happened.

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