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In the question https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/8915/is-anyone-aware-of-this-movie, it turns out that the thing the OP was looking for was The Road to El Dorado, which is a DreamWorks film, not an anime. Should we close it as off-topic?

(Personally, I'm ambivalent about this, but I figured I'd bring it up.)

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I say no. If we are to accept questions w/o visual-audio artefacts, we will need to accept a lack of knowledge/awareness of our users in distinguishing anime and non-Japanese animation (technically only their). Whenever one attempts to a question of this type is the words of the asker (OP) should be taken with a grain of salt -- as one's memory is rarely infallible.

This is not to say allow all questions that "look like" anime, but rather give a bit of leeway to the asker (especially if they are new), if they believe the media that's on the tip of their tongue is anime.

SciFi.SE (TV & Movies SE too) on occasion gets questions tagged as anime, when they're not.

Some examples that I've come upon:

I'd rather not be picky about whether or not a series is anime, because sometimes the lines are blurred. I doubt that the distinction is really that important to most users. If we do anything we should usually include a note letting the asker know that the name of the media and how it isn't anime.

tl;dr: I think such questions are okay to stay as is for now, but let try not to let it go out of hand in the future.

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I believe we've been through this in another issue.

You can't judge a question by its answers. You can't close a question because the answers on it would be off-topic. Because the asker can't know that in advance.

If the OP asks a question that by definition is off-topic (the question, not the answers). Close it. If it isn't that obvious, asking here on meta is a right course of action.

A question is to remain open until decided otherwise. And if we do decide otherwise, the change will be reflected here on meta and in the help center.

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    While I don't really disagree with letting these questions stay open, these questions strike me as similar to "you forgot a close-parenthesis" questions over at SO, which do get closed. Those questions are treated as off-topic, even though the asker couldn't know that in advance (if they did, they would have added the close-parenthesis and not asked the question in the first place!).
    – senshin
    Commented Apr 27, 2014 at 19:00
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    @senshin: Well, in that case, there's a fundamental difference as though why these questions get closed. They get closed because the regulars are sick and tired of being human debuggers for people. We aren't there yet. So I say we accept this relatively small margin of error, it's not substantial enough for us to worry.
    – Madara's Ghost Mod
    Commented Apr 27, 2014 at 19:13
  • Sounds fair enough to me.
    – senshin
    Commented Apr 27, 2014 at 19:14
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If the question makes it clear that it isn't anime then close it however if the user is unsure if it's actually anime then allow the question.

When it gets answered and we find that it's not an anime title. if the user returns and confirms it or the answer itself matches the question without question i would suggest migrating the question/answer to something like TV & Movies.

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