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There is an extremely bad policing and constant down-voting of questions with the [identify-this-movie] and other identify-this- tags. In my view this is a bad practice and something needs to be done about it. "The question is vague, unclear, too broad..." - those are some of the reasons for downvoting and closing the mentioned questions. If a person remembers something about the show they did their best to put the information in the question. This tag brings in a lot of traffic and content and it's been policed so poorly. This is not the StackOverflow, this has a lot of to do with emotions of the OP. Having said that, my questions is this: Will there be any changes in how the above questions are handled? Something has to be done with this senseless down-voting and closing of the perfectly sensible questions. To illustrate I am giving links to my first question that was closed and a second one that's been put on hold on Movies & TV.

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    There are many many many users who want these questions to go away. In order to keep them we established very strict quality control rules for ID questions. If an ID question doesn't meet them, expect them to be agressively dealt with by that segment of the community.
    – KutuluMike
    Commented Jun 22, 2016 at 17:48
  • @KutuluMike Since you are the one of a few people that put that second question on hold can you please give me the reasoning behind it? Both questions were answered and I found what I was looking for. I also made best effort to write down all the memories I had about those movies.
    – user36564
    Commented Jun 22, 2016 at 17:50
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    I don't consider "everything I remember about it" a good judge of quality. You were given guidelines when you picked the ID tag of the things we want to see in a question. In my opinion (as just one user), if you don't know those things, don't ask the question here. There are other sites on the internet dedicated to these kinds of guessing games.
    – KutuluMike
    Commented Jun 22, 2016 at 17:57
  • Just take a look at number of upvotes to answers to my questions. Either your notice needs to be changed or all of the Joes Average who upvoted the answers are wrong. I would really like the management to consider this issue. I see this happening to other questions as well.
    – user36564
    Commented Jun 22, 2016 at 18:01
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    Being "answerable" and having sufficient detail are not the same thing. We have no way of judging "answerability"... we can judge sufficient detail.
    – Catija
    Commented Jun 22, 2016 at 19:41
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    Let's not be coy here: Regardless of the OP's examples above, there has been a suspicious amount of long, elaborate ID Qs that do play by the rules and include plenty of details that some people are CVing anyway lately. I can't say I like that as it: 1. Confuses people as to what good and bad ID is; 2. Discourages newbies and 3. Crowds the task list when Mods have enough bad ID to deal with. Like it or not, ID is currently on-topic and this blanket CVing is really the wrong attitude IMO.
    – Walt
    Commented Jun 22, 2016 at 20:07
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    Possible duplicate of: Why are movie and TV show identification questions so underrated?
    – Napoleon Wilson Mod
    Commented Jun 23, 2016 at 8:59
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    This is what I think about identity this movie tag. Let's see... I find a youtube clip from a movie in the mid-70s or 80s, I give a vague description of that exact clip, some fuzzy details and then wait until another user posts the answer and includes that very clip. That is one very easy way of posting numerous questions. I think the questions only help the asker and the answerer. Once it has been answered the post disappears into oblivion.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Jun 28, 2016 at 22:05
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    Bear in mind that the number of fuzzy descriptions of boring movies made for TV, or not, have actually discouraged me from participating more on this website. I even saw users posting a gif and asking the community to identify that movie. Absurd.
    – Mari-Lou A
    Commented Jun 28, 2016 at 22:10
  • I've filtered out all the ID questions. The only ones I see don't have an appropriate ID-tag and that's an automatic downvote for me, before I edit in the appropriate tag.
    – BCdotWEB
    Commented Jun 30, 2016 at 14:00
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    @Mari-LouA It is very sad to hear that the overabundance of bad ID questions has deterred you from the site and is actually what I feared would happen. I can only implore you to overthink this decision and help us get them under control as best as possible instead. In fact GIF-only questions are highly discouraged. But we need engaged users to keep them under control and counter the loads of bad content with interesting questions and insightful answers instead.
    – Napoleon Wilson Mod
    Commented Jul 1, 2016 at 18:18
  • Possible duplicate of Why are movie and TV show identification questions so underrated?
    – Luciano
    Commented Sep 14, 2017 at 13:03

1 Answer 1

-2

The first question meets the quality standards described in the help section:

Please try to show effort and give as much detail as possible:

 

  1. Plot details of any scenes you remember

    There was a woman with a child at her side and she was shooting from a handgun at a passing car. As far as I remember the people from the car were threatening her or the child. She looked as either she was protecting the child or was conducting some sort of revenge.

 

  1. Descriptions of any characters or locations

    I think she had blonde hair or was wearing a head scarf and was wearing a gray/blue coat, and the child was a boy.

 

  1. Where you watched the movie or TV show

    I saw a scene from a movie I am looking for now.

 

  1. When you watched the movie or TV show

    MISSING

 

  1. Any idea of how old it was

    The movie was in color and had that classic 70s, 80s look

 

  1. Any idea of country of origin (if known)

    was probably an American production.

 

  1. Whether it was animated or not

    Missing, but obviously not describing an animated movie

 

  1. Any other distinctive detail

    Optional, because this is covered by 1 and 2 really.

So 4 was missing, but its redundant with 5, 7 is obviously not applicable, and 8 is optional. It more than meets the quality standards that are WRITTEN OUT.

It was only closed because there are people who will vote to close any and all identity question, and have even publicly stated they will do that.

The Review Queue history is quite telling that people will blindly close vote any identity question:

enter image description here

enter image description here

Your second question is severely lacking though...

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    The Review Queue history is quite telling that people will blindly close vote any identity question. Not necessarily. It might also tell that most IDs are simply bad questions and in my opinion this is the actual reason of these 20+ closures you provided as an example. It is certainly the reason for my 4 closures on the list. I never blindly close anything, be it ID or not. Commented Jun 23, 2016 at 8:30
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    Your analysis of the first question is almost absurdly generous. "I saw a scene from a movie I am looking for now." does not describe where you saw it, and "it was in color and looked 70s or 80s" means it could be any time in the past 35 years, since plenty of movies look 70s or 80s on purpose. And yes, I am agressively VTC' bad ID questions so they will fall off the front page ASAP and discourage others from asking equally bad ones.
    – KutuluMike
    Commented Jun 23, 2016 at 11:14
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    @KutuluMike Er, AFAIK, VTCing does not make things 'fall off the front page'. Only a -4 score does. VTCs only put a Q 'on hold' (and you need 5 of them) and if it doesn't improve after a few days it's 'closed' - all while still very much on the front page. Finally, after like a month of no further improvement, it's deleted - and the front page has since changed plenty of times anyway. So I don't understand that reasoning at all.
    – Walt
    Commented Jun 23, 2016 at 16:06

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