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I'm trying to get a better understanding of the community here.

old movie possibly in 90's with multiple story

The above question was asked, and while I appreciate it's now on hold as a identify question I believe the answer I gave was correct, and straight to the point. I also included a link to IMDB to back up my answer.

So my question is, was my answer deleted because it was short and included a link as suggested in the help centre? or because it was in response to an identify question?

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There's a general policy to discourage answering off-topic questions.

The logic is that if people can get an answer to an off-topic question, then they can ask anything they feel like and get an answer.

For the fly-by questioners, rather than those who will become long-term community members, this gives them simple satisfaction - at cost to the overall community.

Sometimes it's hard to resist, or to poke in a quick comment with the answer before it gets closed... but it doesn't do the community any good in the long term.

That particular question was so obviously the movie you mentioned that I had to slap my own wrists a couple of times to prevent me answering it myself.
I think you need 10k rep to see deleted posts, so I'm not going to duplicate the answer here and risk violating all I just said ;-)

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    Okay that makes sense, so it's not that the answer itself was wrong or poor quality but rather, about the integrity of the community? we don't want to reinforce bad habits, Cool thanks. Aug 30, 2018 at 10:25
  • Indeed....I also recognised it immediately. Fortunately the OP took my advice about trying SF&F - scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/193850/…
    – Paulie_D
    Aug 30, 2018 at 18:02
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was my answer deleted because it was short and included a link as suggested in the help centre? or because it was in response to an identify question?

I'd say both of those reasons in combination. Tetsujin already gave a pretty good rundown of why answering off-topic questions might generally not be the best idea. But in addition to that the answer also was quite a bad answer in itself. It was only a title. Okay, it included a link to IMDb, but there was nothing explaining why the answer was supposedly correct.

Even if we still did identification questions, this answer would at least have gotten a post-notice encouraging more elaboration and might have ended up deleted if that request wasn't followed through to some degree. Combining this with the factors Tetsujin explains in his answer made it viable for immediate deletion.

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