I recently noticed that I could now review posts and do some basic review tasks. In regards to the 'first posts' and 'late posts' in particular, I feel that if the reviewer(s) did their job adequately, we would not see so many downvotes on first time users questions. We still might see some but the basic errors of;
*"Hi my name is ... and I wanted to know ... any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
"I love security! I love this site! Go Eagles!"
"What do you guys think of ... ? I think it's bad/good, am I correct?"
"What is the best security tool?"
would be largely absent.
At the time of this posting, there are two questions asked within a few hours with 6 downvotes. I feel this is a shortcoming of the reviewers. Further, I think at least some of that shortcoming may spring from the fact that reviewers may seem rushed to perform a review task before someone else (for some reason humans are motivated by virtual badges).
I propose that for some or all of the review tasks, we impose a timed-lock of sorts to allow the reviewers to actually take the time needed to read and correct the posts. Something as simple as a message saying, "This post currently being reviewed. Your review will be queued second and used if the original reviewer does not finish." may work just fine.
Programmatically (I'm a programmer by trade), it could be implemented by storing the 'queued' reviews in a table or cache until needed or not needed (if not needed, then deleted from the cache/table). I assess this to be of little programming impact with potentially higher quality posts.
And we may already be implementing a lock just behind the scenes. If so, I say we peel back the veil...