Please unlock, undelete, & reopen closed ID questions in line with our community consensus

Question

As you may be aware, our community has recently reaffirmed its support for identification questions. Relevant previously featured June 2024 meta discussion post: What does the community want to do with identification questions? This decision has led to several important updates:

1. The identification close reason has been removed.
2. Our site tour and help center have been updated to remove references to the ID ban.
3. Stack Exchange staff have unblacklisted the ID tags.

However, there's one more step we need to take: addressing the previously closed identification questions.

When the ID ban was implemented back in 2018, a moderator mentioned that the mod team asked Stack Exchange staff to automatically close all existing identification questions and apply a historical lock. This lock prevents non-moderator users from voting on (including voting to reopen), flagging, or editing these questions.

• Closing all existing questions (starting 15 days from now):

We will ask SE for help in automatically closing all existing identification questions and, for the time being, applying a historical lock to them (which makes them unvotable and uneditable by non-moderator users, as well as removing them from normal question lists).

^{- Napoleon Wilson. "We are discontinuing support for identification questions"}

Relevant meta post: Identification Question Cleanup: Closing existing questions.

The moderator also mentioned that they would be "cleaning up the existing [ID] questions." As a result, 3,726 ID questions were mass-deleted during the 2018 ID question cleanup (for example), along with an unknown number of questions deleted after the 2018 cleanup. Relevant meta post: Identification Question Cleanup: Deleting old questions.

Thus we will be deleting all existing identification questions unless they meet all of the following criteria:

• They have a score of +5 or more.
• They have at least one answer with a score of +3 or more.

^{- Napoleon Wilson. "Identification Question Cleanup: Deleting old questions"}

Given our community's clear consensus to allow ID questions, I believe it's time to reverse these actions. I'm requesting that we:

1. Unlock these "historical significance" locked ID questions.
2. Undelete any ID questions that were previously closed and deleted for being off-topic under the old guidelines.
3. Reopen the closed ID questions.

Since the initial mass locking, closing, and deleting involved Stack Exchange staff, I'm hoping our moderators will add the status-review tag to this post. This will escalate the issue to SE staff, in line with the process outlined in the Meta Stack Exchange post: "What posts should be escalated to staff using [status-review], and how do I escalate them?"

Keeping these questions locked, closed, and deleted despite our clear community consensus and policy to allow them, will confuse users and send the wrong messages about our site policy.

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^{Note: I initially flagged this post requesting a status-review tag but was declined with the reason: "flags should only be used to make moderators aware of content that requires their intervention."}

^{I believed this was precisely the type of post requiring moderator intervention, as only moderators can add the status-review tag. Despite the flag decline, a moderator has since added the status-review tag. Could the moderator team clarify the reasoning behind these actions?}

Answer 1

Keeping previously closed, locked, and deleted identification questions in their current state presents several issues:

1. We may find ourselves in the awkward position of needing to close new identification questions as duplicates of closed and locked ones. This goes against best practices, as we typically avoid closing questions as duplicates of closed questions, let alone locked ones. For example, we recently had to navigate this issue with the question "Horror show where the protagonist has really nice-tasting blood". While we resolved that particular case by reopening and unlocking the target question, similar situations are bound to crop up if we don't take action on all affected questions.

2. The current message on locked questions states, "This question and its answers are locked because the question is off-topic but has historical significance." This is no longer true for identification questions, as they are now on-topic. Also, it's a stretch to claim that all 976 (not deleted) and 3,726+ (deleted) closed identification questions truly have historical significance.

3. The current blanket locking doesn't align with Stack Exchange's policy on permanent "historical significance" locks. According to this policy, such locks should be used sparingly and primarily for questions of exceptional historical or cultural value, and should not be used for any other purpose:

   Permanent locks should almost never be used, with the exception of those imposed by the system itself. There are some exceptions:

   1. An extremely popular question which is now considered inappropriate for the site may be locked for "Historical significance": this alters the appearance of the question, automatically locks all answers as well, and disables flagging completely. This lock should be reserved for cases where a cherished cultural artifact would otherwise be deleted; do not use it for any other purpose.

By unlocking, undeleting, and reopening these questions, we can create a more consistent experience for users and ensure our past content aligns with our current policy. This action would foster a more welcoming environment for those interested in identification questions and prevent potential confusion or frustration for both new and existing users.

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Some moderators, in the comments, have suggested taking a selective approach to restoring identification questions rather than the comprehensive restoration outlined in the feature request. However, I believe this approach overlooks several important factors.

Most, if not all, identification questions deleted by a moderator after the 2018 ID questions purge (including several in 2024) were actually good questions with enough detail that would likely receive community support today. In fact, we've already seen evidence of this—our community has successfully reopened and undeleted several previously closed identification questions, doing so based on the questions' merit rather than their age or score. Some of the undeleted questions have even received correct answers; opportunities that would have been permanently lost had the questions remained deleted.

We already have a system in place to handle low-quality content. The Community user's automated cleanup scripts, AKA Roomba, automatically remove questions with zero or negative scores that meet certain criteria. If any problematic posts do slip through, our community can evaluate and close them through the normal question review process.

Given these safeguards, there's little risk in taking a comprehensive approach to restoring these questions. The potential benefit of recovering valuable content far outweighs any temporary moderation overhead we might encounter.