Can we get some more definitive numbers on identification-request stats?

Question

Identification requests are a constant cause for concern in our community. Some say we should ban then altogether, some argue that we should just be more rigid in enforcing a set of guidelines, some agree with this last group but think we need to revise our current guidelines, and some think we’re perfectly fine the way we are.

Though it may not be determinant in making a decision, some more definitive numbers on identification requests and its users would help the community make a more informed decision, or at least allow the community to know these numbers. It would be good to know:

• How many users asked an identification-request as their first question;
• How many of these questions have been deleted and why;
• When were these users created in relation to their first question;
• How many of these users accessed our site after having asked their first question;
• What are the scores of these questions;
• How many of these users sticked around to ask/answer more questions.

Answer 1

All the following numbers are as of today’s date (July 21st, 2015).

We currently have a grand total of 1,593 undeleted questions tagged with identification-request.

Of these, 1,246 were asked by their owners as their first post, and 1,212 were tagged exclusively with identification-request¹.

This means that 347 of our currently undeleted questions tagged with identification-request were asked by users who had previously contributed to the site in other tags. Furthermore, there were an additional 321 questions tagged with identification-request which were first questions, and were subsequently deleted (11 of which had other tags too)².

To put it in percentages, approximately 76.1% of the undeleted identification-request questions were a user’s first question (tagged only with identification-request), which means:

Approximately 20.4% of our total undeleted questions were asked by (1,212) users that came here to have an anime or manga identified for them.

Of the 1,212 users whose first post was a (currently undeleted) identification-request question:³

• 820 (67.7%) were created at the exact same time the question was created
• 26 (2.2%) were created up to a minute before the question was created
• 22 (1.8%) were created between 1 and 2 minutes before the question was created
• 77 (6.4%) were created between 2 and 5 minutes before the question was created
• 193 (16%) were created between 5 and 30 minutes before the question was created
• 22 (1.8%) were created between 30 minutes and 1 hour before the question was created
• 11 (0.9%) were created between 1 hour and 1 day before the question was created
• 7 (0.6%) were created between 1 day and 1 week before the question was created
• 27 (2.2%) were created over a week before the question was created

Of the 1,212 users whose first post was a (currently undeleted) identification-request question:³

• 198 (16.3%) last accessed our site at the exact same time the question was created
• 158 (13.0%) last accessed our site after the question was posted and up to 1 hour after that
• 45 (3.8%) last accessed our site between 1 and 2 hours after the question was posted
• 52 (4.3%) last accessed our site between 2 and 5 hours after the question was posted
• 149 (12.3%) last accessed our site between 5 hours and 1 day after the question was posted
• 247 (20.4%) last accessed our site between 1 day and 1 week after the question was posted
• 168 (13.9%) last accessed our site between 1 week and 1 month after the question was posted
• 188 (15.5%) last accessed our site over 1 month after the question was posted

Regarding the scores for these 1,212 question:

• The lowest scored questions are at -5, and there are 4 of them
• The highest scored question is at 26, with the runner-up scoring 17
• The average score is 2.5
• The median is 2
• The standard deviation is 3.1
• The sum for all the values is 2,987

Of the 1,212 users:⁴

• 1,014 (83.7%) have a single post on our site
• 121 (10%) have 2 posts on our site
• 34 (2.8%) have 3 posts on our site
• 10 (0.8%) have 4 posts on our site
• 3 (0.3%) have 5 posts on our site
• 5 (0.4%) have 6 posts on our site
• 1 (0.1%) has 7 posts on our site
• 1 (0.1%) has 8 posts on our site
• 2 (0.2%) have 9 posts on our site
• 1 (0.1%) has 10 posts on our site
• 20 (1.7%) have more than 10 posts on our site

The user whose first post was an identification request question and that has subsequently asked/answered the most questions has 77 answers and 5 questions.

Of the 310 deleted questions that were a user's first post, tagged only with identification-request:

• 219 (70.5%) were removed by the system:^{4 5}
  • 182 (83.1% of system removed, 58.7% of total⁶) of which were abandoned closed questions
  • 29 (13.2% of system removed, 9.4% of total⁶) of which were dead questions
  • 4 (1.8% of system removed, 1.3% of total⁶) of which were removed along with the user⁷
  • 3 (1.4%) of system removed, 1% of total⁶) of which were stubs for migrated questions
  • 1 (0.5% of system removed, 0.3% of total⁶) of which were abandoned questions
• 58 (18.7%) were removed by moderators
• 31 (10%) were self-deleted
• 2 (0.7%) were removed via vote

Of the 1,212 users whose first post was a (currently undeleted) identification-request question:⁴

• 1,112 (91.8%) don't have the informed badge⁸
• 100 (8.3%) have the informed badge⁸

Of the 310 users whose first post was a currently deleted identification-request question:⁴

• 290 (93.6%) don't have the informed badge⁸
• 20 (6.5%) have the informed badge⁸

---

¹ The 34 questions that had other tags will be discarded from here on, since I’m trying to find questions that were about identifying an anime or manga for sure, and not to identify a piece of music or a certain reference of some kind in other anime or manga.

² I’ve discarded the deleted questions because some of them are spam or nonsense, so it would only create some noise on the rest of the numbers. As such, I decided to only take into consideration questions that have not been deleted as of this time.

³ Missing 7 users because these were deleted users, or users who didn’t have an account here an whose question was migrated here, etc.

⁴ Percentages aren't exactly 100% due to rounding.

⁵ See this Meta post for more info on what abandoned, abandoned closed and dead questions are.

⁶ "Total" here meaning the 310 deleted questions that were a user's first post, tagged only with identification-request.

⁷ Removed along with a user who had been just created to post that question, but then self-deleted their account.

⁸ The informed badge is earned when users scroll through the tour page. Used here to try to understand how many of these users have actually tried to find out how our site works before asking a question. For reference, 684 (8.3%) of our total users have this badge — which means those users actually don't fall too far from the overall average.

Answer 2

Thanks @JNat for the data, here are some graphs to visualize this information better.

Notes:

• I'm going to refer to "Users whose first post was a (currently undeleted) identification-request question" as ID-Users during this post.
• Curve graphs are smoothed.
• I'm listing some observations too, hopefully being unbiased.

Percentage of ID Requests

Id Requests are just over a quarter of all undeleted questions

How many of the ID-User's First Questions are deleted?

When Are ID-Users Accounts made?

Most Users accounts are created at the same time as the question is asked. Or at least, in the same day.

When do ID-Users visit after asking their question?

There's a big dip between 1hr and 24hrs. Do we have a split of ask-and-run users and users who genuinely care about their question?

The majority of users don't care enough to visit again, but there are also users who have revisited the site later.

A lot of users only ask one question, Some ask another, but less than 10% ask more than that. @JNat points a 20+ user that "has subsequently asked/answered the most questions has 77 answers and 5 questions".

ID_Users with the "Informed" badge

The tour page isn't being read by the majority of users. But as @JNat mentions: 8.3% of our total users have this badge and this isn't too far off this figure - so in general the tour page isn't being read.

Graph of the amount of ID Requests relative to other Questions (/10) over time:

Source (Shown by user @Hakase)

Graph of the percentage of questions that are ID Requests on the site over time

Source (Shown by user @senshin)

Answer 3

It is almost two months ago that we blacklisted id requests and I was interested in how this impacted our monthly registration quota. So I went to SEDE and compiled this query.

This query returns accurate results for the rows with '4 Months before' or further below. This is because of the way automatic account deletions work.

This query shows the amount of new users that registered between the 24th 00:00:00 of the month and the 23rd 23:59:59 of the next month. The second column is the amount of users that were created in that timeframe and also had at least two Posts in that timeframe. The last column is the percentage of users that satisfy the second condition out of all the users that satisfy the first condition.

Looking at the data, it doesn't seem that blacklisting the tag did have any affect on the absolute number of active users. Instead, the amount of inactive users shrank.

Of course, there are some errors in the query, e.g. it does only count posts that were created between 24th and 23rd. A user that was created on the 23rd and created lots of posts since then but no second post on the 23rd is not counted.