115
Just an observation; Walt was recently lauded for hitting the 100K mark here in terms of rep. Take note that 67% of his posts are in identify-this-movie and another I'm-not-really-sure-how-many are in identify-this-tv-show. Our biggest contributor just lost his biggest tags.
Actually, we voted on this in 2016 and we decided to keep them. I don't know why ...
79
No, we should not ban identification questions as off-topic!
They do fit the Q&A format and should be allowed here. And the situation still can work well if we go by the current rule of closing all detail-lacking ID questions and keeping the proper formatted ones. We already have done a lot to control their quality too. And it has many benefits too:
By ...
51
I think one option we could do is create a meta post detailing the avenues/resources that our experts would follow in order to identify movies and tv shows. This way we can at least point users to a reference to help them find what they want, rather than just telling them 100% no. I think putting this in either the tag wiki or the closing reason would be ...
29
My first question was an identify question. I know I'm not the most valuable member of the community, but I believe I've given valuable contributions to the community over time. I also know that any answer I write is going to be too late to change any policy since the decision has already been made. I would have voiced my opinion earlier but I didn't find ...
28
First of all, there are a few sites within the StackExchange network which still accept such questions:
Science Fiction & Fantasy obviously requires the work to contain distinct science-fiction or fantasy content. You can consult their meta on how to ask a good story-ID question.
Music Fans currently takes questions asking to identify music videos. But ...
26
Yes, we shall ban identification questions as off-topic!
They are just not a good fit for this site and I see them as the bane of this site for all the reasons mentioned in the question, but primarily because they won't ever decline and they won't ever improve. The situation will only ever get worse and worse and worse, like it did over all those years ...
22
There's a few reasons why these identify-this-movie and identify-this-tv-show tend to get frequently downvoted:
Poor formatting/grammar
I edited the question you linked to. Before I edited it, it looked like this:
theres this movie i remember from my childhood about a city of
monsters living underground and the monsters went up to the human
city/...
19
As to the point of identification questions specifically, I'm afraid the community has decided to no longer support them on this site, so your question likely won't be appropriate to begin with. However, regarding your general question about describing a very sexual scene:
First of all, textual descriptions are much less problematic than pictorial ones to ...
18
Identification questions is what introduced me to this site. It is also why I got addicted to it. It is really a shame to see it go away. Especially when there is no other site that provides such service and has such powerful community. And extra especially when the community never complained about such feature.
17
First, I kinda wish this data were available to the public. Second, I'm really interested in figuring out whether these questions are worth the effort. So I'm going to try to pull up stats that I think get at the underlying question, which I read as:
Do identification questions bring useful new users to the site?
Paging through the site's Greatest Hits, ...
17
Now first of all, what is an "identification question" or "ID question"? Quite simply, it is any question tagged with a tag of the form identify-this-..., in particular the tags identify-this-movie, identify-this-tv-show, identify-this-actor and identify-this-episode. For assessing those statistics, I'll mostly employ the site's real-time search features as ...
17
I'm not here to there you what you should and shouldn't do, but rather share with you the perspectives of another SE site that dealt with a similar string of questions for over three years.
What should be expected from the opposing side
Those in opposition to identification requests removal need to do more than speak out against it. If you want these ...
15
I didn't see that since I don't check Meta
Sorry if this is harsh to hear but that's your fault.
the Meta Question "Check in on Identification questions" was posted Nov 27 '17 at 16:57
the first answer was posted Nov 28 '17 at 15:26 by iandotkelly ♦
the last answer was posted answered Nov 29 '17 at 15:11 by Paulie_D.
None of the posted answers were for ...
14
I don't think we should allow questions about pornographic movies here, for one simple reason:
They don't meet the quality standards of content we discuss on this site.
I think the same argument applies to porn which applies to web-series: If it is produced on an amateur level or simply does not adhere to our quality standards regarding production or ...
14
Not sure if this should be an "answer" or a comment, but I think that the tags should still show up in the selectable list when someone is asking a question with a warning of not to use the tags. If the tags are just not visible, people might try to create a new tag, or just use other unrelated tags and not notice that Identification is no longer a valid ...
13
As someone who's seen a lot of ID questions, I have no doubt there are plenty of Good ID questions (though ID detractors might imagine Good ID in quotes). But it's almost equally evident that Bad ID (brief, 1-2 line questions lacking basic details) has been increasing, sometimes coming in waves as if something triggered it. Yes, we can improve them sometimes,...
13
The examples you have provided are 2-3 years old. The site policy for Identification questions has been changed since then.
With a huge numbers of bad questions accumulating on the main site, a stricter policy was introduced.
What an identification question should contain is mentioned here. Detailed ID questions makes it easy to identify a movie/TV show/...
12
NO
Identification questions have an understandably bad reputation here on Movies and TV for a good reason...
It's incredibly hard to write a good one and incredibly easy to write a bad one.
At best this is an amalgam of identify-this-actor (which is usually an image) and an identify-this-image question and the latter of those is specifically off-topic.
...
11
So looking at stats...
Right now we have 657 total ID question over 1 year and 11 months
(approx 701 days) = a little less than one per day.
These comprise 19.8% of our total questions (3315).
SE shows us as having 4.9K users, but when you go to look at the user stats, only 386 users have over 200 points, thousands have asked/answered no questions at all, ...
11
Flags are a bad fit for this. They're expedient if you only expect to migrate maybe a half-dozen questions, ever, but if you expect to migrate "as many as possible" of the 4K+ ID questions here it puts entirely too much responsibility on entirely too few people: the flaggers from SFF and the mod team here.
Such a campaign stands to affect a lot ...
10
While we're at the task of cleaning up the identify tags (as much as possible) it might be worth also trying to improve identify-this-actor. It's not nearly the crisis that identify-this-movie is, but as you mentioned, there's no harm in improving the tag guidance.
In particular, bad actor-ID questions tend to be of the form "here's a screen cap, who is ...
9
View from another perspective:
I am always interested in these discussions about what is an acceptable question and what is not. I remember answering a question once about a piece of music that was in an episode of Louie. In hunting it down, I found that people were looking for this answer in forums all over the Internet. I found the answer and posted it, ...
9
I think the difference in return rates of 17% vs 25% isn't particularly compelling but I completely agree with the argument that it takes a lot of the collective moderation of the site dealing with them, and the current rules are far too arbitrary.
The hoops for asking an ID question have gotten too arbitrary and complicated In order for an ID question to ...
9
It sounds like there is enough support for a Movie/TV Trivia SE.
Seems odd to create what will essentially be a competing group, but other areas of SE have branched apart, so it's not unprecedented.
9
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 ...
8
If the vote does go against banning them, I think this plan has merit, at least to help address the problems with the site image that Napoleon Wilson mentioned on the post about banning id questions. But note that we tried many similar things on Anime and Manga. These policies worked to a point, but they required tons of work to keep up, and when the same ...
8
I have addressed the tremendous problem these questions pose on the health of this site in this previous question before (which with its many links might also be a good starting point for related reading for anyone not too familiar with the long "tradition" this issue has on our meta site), but I'll try to summarize the essentials again. First of all, I ...
8
I have to say that who want ID question to stay didn't get the chance to say anything. And (like me) probably wasn't aware of this discussion.
As for why it should stay, is simply because it's simply the most active part of the site (~40% of all questions). And "identify this movie" is the 2nd highest tag despite deleting a lot of its questions due to some ...
8
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 ...
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