CCoyote said:
I don't know how hard this would be to code, but you could have an upvote/downvote system visible only to janitors and above, for the purpose of polling whether borderline drawing should be approved. The upvote/downvote system is already in place, so maybe the existing one could be duplicated for that.

If a janitor or above comes along and decides to just approve it outright, then they could do that, too, just like they do now.

I thought about this, but if the point is to maximize utility, minimize friction, and minimize the scope of a change, I felt favorites were a better model to start from for the following reasons:

• Anyone who would "upvote" an ambiguous quality post already thinks it is of sufficient quality to approve, why not just approve it?

• Is a "Score"-like widget sufficiently informative? It gives a difference between ups and downs, but we probably care more about the total number of votes.

• It might be important to know who has voted. Although the site nominally trusts all the janitors with approval powers, surely there are janitors who are viewed as more authoritative by other janitors. And by the time a "Favorited by"-style name list would get truncated, there are enough votes against the post that the exact people to have voted probably doesn't matter anymore.

• My understanding is that some folks do prefer to work from the search page. How easy is it to extend the different search page modes for an upvote/downvote-style system? "Add to favorites" and "remove from favorites" are already modes available to normal users, but not "upvote" and "downvote", so it may be more work to expose a clone of voting than a clone of favoriting.

Edit: One more thought that occurs to me about allowing "upvote"-style voting is that it might actually undermine the intent of preventing things from timing out, by expanding the grey area of things "nominally above the quality bar, but not enough for us to approve it". It may be preferable to only allow votes for delete.