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I noticed that the template for replying to id-requests has become something like

  • Name of the manga/anime
  • Picture with evidence
  • Synopsis
  • Link(s) to sources

Coincidently I came across some old one-liner answers from 2013. There will probably be more of those around.

At that time it was apparently accepted to give one-liner answers, while now they would be voted down or suggested to edit with more evidence. If such answers are encountered much after date, should they be flagged according to the current standard that is set out? Or should they be left alone as it might become a tedious job cleaning them all up and not really worth it?

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    Id-requests (answer and question) aren't very searchable as they stand, but you can flag those question for a moderator to review. I personally don't like them and will at least add a post notice to them if they are not accepted.
    – кяαzєя Mod
    Aug 21, 2014 at 18:51
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    I'm not a huge fan of this template to be honest. It's okay for some answers, but often times there's other information which is more important that doesn't get added when you follow this, e.g. what episode an image is from, who the characters are, what the context of the image is, etc. In many cases the synopses given are just copied from wikipedia or somewhere else and slightly modified, which is not terribly helpful if they aren't tailored to the actual question. Still better than one-liners, but I don't think this should be the "new standard" or anything like that.
    – Logan M
    Aug 21, 2014 at 23:42
  • @LoganM I guess the template would be for picture based one-liner what anime is this requests. I usually only answer those as I have trouble finding the text based ones. We should make a community program that crawls the internet for those damn requests or something lol. And for those requests I do indeed add episode number and time frame and i'll add character name too, but unless more is asked thats it.
    – Peter Raeves
    Aug 22, 2014 at 6:25

2 Answers 2

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As there are currently around 500+ questions under , I think it is possible to clean up old answers. There is no need to do it all at once - just do a few at a time - to avoid getting tired at the workload and also preventing the active list from being flooded with old questions.

I suggest prioritize editing answers which have been accepted, or confirmed by the OP to be the answer via comment. Low-quality answers which are added later on, or those that the editor cannot be sure to answer the question, should be left alone (or flagged).

When editing, please try your best to match the details in the question. The synopsis alone may not have much similarity to the description in the question. I understand this is effort unrewarded, but if one cares about the quality of the sites, reputation doesn't really matter.

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I'm not convinced this is worth the effort to clean up. Of course, any improvements are always welcome, but I think there are probably other things which are more critical to improve, e.g. ID request titles. If you encounter an answer like this in "the wild" and feel like cleaning it up, go for it, but I have a hard time believing it's worth anyone's time to actively search these out.

However, this is something that we can find relatively easily, unlike poorly titled questions. I wrote a data explorer query for this purpose (mostly by cutting and pasting stuff from other queries). It returns a list of all answers with a given tag sorted by their length in characters, and some other meta data related to them. While this could be improved by dealing with links and images better, it should be useful at least for finding the worst offenders if you feel so inclined.

With that said, a word of caution. You can certainly find most of the answers which need more detail this way, but the false positive rate is also large (probably over 50% even if you only look at the shortest few dozen answers). Many of the answers, including some with a very low character count, are nonetheless perfectly complete answers to the question which anyone can verify. If you are going to do this, I suggest focusing on the ones which need additional information to be verifiable by someone who has not watched/read the series, not just anything which is short. I also agree with nhahtdh's answer to prioritize accepted answers and to tailor edits to the question as best as possible.

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