Thank you

First of all, I want to say thanks for this. The Staging Ground really came a long way.

I want to thank the developers, especially to Yaakov Ellis. It was a pleasure to directly give feedback on the Staging Ground and see how the Staging Ground was constantly improved during the betas. It was nice to see that our feedback mattered - and it resulted in a lot of changes.
Then, I want to thank all other staff members that made the Staging Ground possible. This includes but is not limited to people pushed the Staging Ground/told others about its importance, CMs Communicating it, Management deciding to put resources into it (I can't believe I'm writing this) and whoever else helped the Staging Ground come alive.
Finally, I am thankful to all other beta testers that found many issues leading to improvements in the Staging Ground.

I'm grateful for making this possible.

Don't release and ignore it

You mentioned you would be monitoring the Staging Ground for potential issues which is great to hear. Please also make sure to fix any issues that might occur, implement further abuse prevention mechanisms if these will be necessary (e.g. if there are many people bypassing the Staging Ground by reposting their question or reviewers are only using the SG to be the Fastest Gun in the West and the tooling (which I don't know) is insufficient for that), address (meaning considering them and responding appropriately, I am not saying you should implement everything) potential feature requests and most of all ensure that scaling works.

Please don't just make it something like the Review queues where they are just there with many issues that are never addressed.

Questions/Suggestions about the changes you made

E-Mails

You mentioned

Reviewers will receive an email notification when there’s new activity in a post they reviewed

Is it possible to disable this? When reviewing a lot of posts, that would accumulate to a significant amount of E-Mails. Please consider

• Only sending one per day (or similar) if there are more.
• Allow reviewers to easily opt-out of these E-Mails.

Personally, I prefer normal inbox notifications for these kinds of events and react when I have time for it.
After all, I don't want to see people not wanting to review questions because of getting overfilled with E-Mails.

Privilege

You also wrote

If a user has earned 500 reputation points, they have access to review queues and can join in the efforts to improve the quality of new questions on the platform. This includes access to Staging Ground.

Is this just a part of the access review queues privilege or will this be its own privilege given to users with the same reputation level? If it's the same privilege, can you consider renaming it to "access review queues and the Staging Ground" or something similar to make the Staging Ground stand out as its own thing apart from Review queues?

Robo-reviewing

Is there anything (you can share) that's planned against Robo-reviewing similar to Audits in review queues? I am not saying this should or shouldn't be implemented but it would be good to know.

Are there things built into the system that intuitively discourage robo-reviewing? Here, I am not talking about systems that detect it and raise it to mods but about things in the system that encourage reviewers to do it properly.

Concrete scaling plans

Do you have concrete plans for scaling except gamification using badges?

Answers to your questions

These are my opinions on the questions you asked.

Why are certain questions on the site considered good and well-written?

In general, the most important thing is that it's easy to understand what the OP wants to know. Then there are quite a few other things making a question good like properly using codeblocks, having a proper title, not being full of clutter, having some structure (not being all over the place), only asking a single question, ideally not being full of typos (not the most important thing), etc. Questions should also show that the author put (research) effort in.

For debugging questions, this includes having a MCVE including the actual and expected output.

What are the characteristics/components of a question?

This depends on the question. For debugging questions, I want to know what the issue is, the code (an MCVE), possible errors, actual and expected output and ideally also showing what the author tried.

For "how to do XYZ" questions, I would like to see what exactly they want to do, why this is needed (avoiding XY problems) and their attempt (if applicable).

What criteria should be used to evaluate whether a draft is likely to be successful?

The things I mentioned above should be satisfied. Also, no close reason should apply.

What do reviewers prioritize when evaluating new questions?

I think it is

• The overall structure of the question
• Does the question make sense?
• Is it clear what the author is asking and what technologies they are talking about (if applicable)?
• (Maybe) does the title summarize the question?
• Do any (typical) close reasons apply?
• Everything that has a comment template (though I think the template asking the user to read over the post for minor changes wasn't of much use)

During the betas, I have written my own comment templates for common situations (^{shameless plug}). These are

• Questions on Stack Overflow should contain everything necessary to answer them. Please [edit] your question and include the _relevant_ parts of your code using a [code block].
• Do you want your question to be published and [post an answer yourself](/help/self-answer) so that future readers can see it or do you want to keep it unpublished?
• Please [edit] your question and include that in it. When it gets published, the comments will be cleaned up so all necessary information should be present in the question itself.
• It seems like you asked multiple questions in one. Please reduce your post to a single question.
• Please [edit] your question to specifically and clearly define the problem you are trying to solve. It seems like your question is quite broad. When asking questions on Stack Overflow, please ask about _specific_ programming problems or similar. Questions that are too broad are [not considered on-topic on Stack Overflow](/help/on-topic).

While these templates are opinionated, I do think these are cases that often occur. I don't think all of these should necessarily be included in the default canned comments but these are things that (in my opinion) often happened during the betas so it would be good to address them.

How do reviewers decide which questions need improvement?

If anything of the things I mentioned needs to be changed, I would consider the post needing improvement (in the case of duplicates or blatantly off-topic/not about programming/wrong site questions, this would be closing it in the SG and writing a comment), the question needs improvement. If I see any other issues, I can also edit them or ask the OP to do so.

Something that was suggested in the closed beta was that users with question bans should be redirected to the Staging Ground (SG) as well. I'm not saying that such users should be able to post as many as they want to the SG (there should still be some kind of rate limit imposed there, perhaps once a month instead, though they can try again sooner if their last post was approved?), however, considering how many users struggle to get out of said bans, having them go through the SG could greatly help them; if they continue to post bad content then those questions aren't ever going to get to the main site so they can't keep digging a deeper and deeper hole.

Although I appreciate this won't be in scope for the initial release, and it does pose additional scaling issues, I would still love to see something like this come to the feature in the future. Hopefully we're see how easily the volume is handled once the launch goes ahead, and then that can be used to work out if it's something we really want in scope for the volume that is both incoming and actively being reviewed.

During the test of this there was talk of reputation incentives for those participating in the staging ground, are they being left out for the initial launch? I don't see any mention of incentives in this post or the help center article.

You asked about criteria to use when reviewing. I suggest reviewing the canned comments proposed at Staging Ground Workflow: Canned Comments. If the Staging Ground was able to fix every issue that corresponds to one of those canned comments, then that would be enormous progress. Those canned comments are the result of a lot of work distilling common problems and shortcomings in posts, so I think you could do worse than to make sure at least those issues are easy to detect and bring to the attention of the poster.

Finally, we will be closely monitoring the pace of new questions relative to active reviewers to ensure there is a healthy balance where asker's feel their questions are seen and reviewers aren't feeling overburdened.

OK, that can be monitored but what will happen if there are too many questions/too few reviewers? How will the balance be ensured?

Is there a chance to get a staging ground for other sites on the network? Some, like Code Golf and Worldbuilding have hacked together "sandboxes" on their Meta sites, but it is hard to get newcomers to notice and use them, and the "technology" (Meta post which can grow to have thousands of answers, and needs custom sorting to be effective) is not very good. These sites would probably benefit substantially from a properly implemented and integrated staging ground.

Access Criteria

I know that scale is going to be a problem and we will need lots of reviewers, but I still think we need to (at least) re-consider the 500 reputation threshold.

I've seen too many bad reviews done by 2k and up users in the queues. While it might be tolerable in the regular queues, I think it becomes a bit more critical in the Staging Ground. Otherwise the SG simply loses most of its purpose. It's counter-productive, two-fold:

• Bad questions might get public to the main site more often.
• Askers will not receive, or worse - receive bad feedback on asking questions.

I would suggest trying to come up with better ways to accept reviewers. One option is by review badges - let's say at least a "Reviewer" badge in Triage and/or First Questions.

On a somewhat related note, this is something I suggested in the beta Teams instance regarding keeping the quality of reviews/onboarding. I will quote it here as most people can't access that:

I think we should forget about audits. Instead, I suggest to take those posts that would be an audit and make them into an "introductory course". Similar to the [tour]. Or more accurately, a merge between the tour and an audit. Let's hand-pick some exemplar posts (for good and bad) and use those as a test. Users will be faced with a post and a question "What action would you take here?" and be given the exact same actions of the SG. According to their response they will get feedback and explanations. Not an audit that bans you, but a test to give you an idea of what is expected. This also gives us the freedom to curate and hand-pick the posts to cover all cases instead of relying on a questionable automatic criteria.

During the beta, it became clear that many Staging Ground reviews take significantly more of a reviewer’s time than existing curation activities across the network. This is still an open question for us, but we will be working on strategies to address this problem.

Since a reviewer can only comment on such a question and unless a templated comment is used, there's always the possibility the comment itself helps the asker to figure out the solution to the problem, comment back to say thanks and forget all about it.

Happened to me and I was baffled; The asker didn't care to "minor edit" the question as I had suggested. Cognitively, the process has been completed.

I had spent time commenting on a "hidden" question, which effectively got answered but shouldn't be published as it was never edited. It would have been a nice question to be properly answered if published.

You may want to consider that, too.

I just edited a post in the second step of reviewing after the OP had added an MRE. Before approving, I edited the post, and both the edit and the edit summary were lost by the system—as a result, I had to fix/edit the post a second time after it had gone through the SG.

I could have told the OP to make the edit themselves, but since they had taken a positive step I decided to edit the post for them to help them out (showing how it's done by example). Also, one of their mistakes was adding a blockquote instead of a source fence, and as usual there's the long-standing bug that the editor doesn't flat remove a blockquote instead quoting it a second time.

Consider fixing the lost edit at least; otherwise you'll be losing all the editing work reviewers may want to contribute. That certainly makes for a frustrating experience.

Already mentioned in comments, but also here as an answer: The scaling problem will likely result in only a very small percentage of new questions getting attention during their stay in the SG. If this is true, then how to distribute reviewers attention within the SG can become an important factor for the usefulness of the feature. I could imagine that attention will be distributed more or less randomly given the long list of new questions every day, but better would be to concentrate on those questions that actually have a chance of becoming good questions afterwards. Not all questions might have equal chances there.

Therefore I advise you to:

• Wait a bit and see how the SG develops, measuring a) the percentage of questions getting attention in the SG and b) the improvement of these questions over questions that didn't get attention. I.e. how these questions fare later on (score, answers, close ratio).
• See if you can correlate some features (asker rep, asker age on platform, other asker activity like ratio of comments to questions, number of votes given, question length, tags, ...) with the improvement factor.
• Use this as preselection criteria for some of the questions that go into the SG. Present them more to reviewers somehow.
• Wait a bit more and again collect statistics.
• Compare the preselected/highlighted questions in the SG with other questions which also got attention and measure the over-improvement.

If the highlighted (promising) questions get improved even more / fare better afterwards while the non-highlighted keep the original improvement, it was worth it. Otherwise just go back to how it is in the beginning.