Do the review audits expect me to recognize an answer as a duplicate without seeing the other answer?

Question

I was asked to review an answer flagged as possible spam. There was nothing spammy about the content, so I marked it as looks ok.

It appears however that the answer I was asked to review has been deleted because it was an exact copy of a positively scored answer on the same question.

But the review doesn't show me the other answers. So it appears as if I am expected to be able to tell the difference between two identical answers while seeing only one of them.

What exactly are the expectations on reviewers that such an audit is supposed to address?

Answer 1

Every time I have ever seen the message "Our system has identified this post as possible spam; please review carefully" it has turned out to be a review audit. I don't know why it's there.

As for the audits, I expect you to curse a lot at their absurdity. That post did indeed get a lot of flags, for the reason you noted, and it was deleted. But the audit system just isn't smart enough to handle this situation.

Answer 2

Indeed, the review audits are crap.

Easiest way to handle them I've found is to follow the link to the original post in question. If there's a discrepancy between the votes (or its deleted/not-deleted status) in what you see in the review queue, and what you see in the actual thread, it's an audit. Otherwise it's real.

Do enough of them, and you get a pretty good sense for when you're seeing something that doesn't seem like it should be in the review queue, too... and that means it's an audit.

As to what review audits were meant to address... jackasses on Stack Overflow who clicked No Action Needed 20 times a day to get their shiny badges. (There was even an awesome thread on mSO around the time that these were introduced where the SE folks said so, but I can't find it right now.) In other words, once again, the mere existence of Stack Overflow members makes the world a slightly worse place than it was before.