Identification Request Cleanup: Phase 1 - Deprecation

Question

I'm here to announce the first phase of the our clean up of "identification request", as detailed in this proposal. Seeing that there have not been any noteworthy counter proposals, we're looking to move ahead with deprecating and eventually removing these questions from the site.

The cleanup will consist of three phases: deprecation, blacklisting, and removal.

Here is a summary of the actions that will be taken in this first phase:

• Phase 1: Deprecation (Ongoing for the next 15 days, until May 23, 2016)

• Modify the existing "minimum standard" off-topic reason Create a new close reason to say:

  Identification questions are off-topic (new and old), because they tend to attract low-quality and low-effort posts. The community has decided to no longer support these questions. Please refer to this meta post for additional details.

  All "identification-request" question are now off-topic and will no longer be accepted on this site. However, such question are still welcome in our main chat for users with with at least 20 rep (globally on StackExchange).

• Encourage all users with the close privilege to close all NEW identification-request questions (those tagged and untagged). In other words, please do as you've been doing for the current "identification-request" questions, but now do them for all new, incoming "identification-requests." You may go around and close older identification request, but any unclosed "identification-request" questions from before this meta post will be taken cared of in Phase Two.
• Inform new users about the merchandise, cosplay, and itasha tags as needed. There will be a separate meta (to be updated) on guidelines of how to use these tags.

What's been updated?

• The "identification-request" close reason status-completed
• The on-topic help page status-completed
• The tour page status-completed
• Added deprecation notice to the tag excerpt and wiki status-completed
• The tooltip reminder for the "identification-request" tag status-completed

What's coming up:

• Phase 2: Blacklisting (15 days from this post, starting May 23, 2016, note the length was shortened after receiving feedback from users)
  1. Ask the CMs for assistance in closing all remaining "identification-requests" (that have not been closed), and apply a historical lock on ALL questions tagged with identification-request (and tag synonyms, as needed) The tag will stay on the post, but it will not be editable by all users, except for moderators and CMs.
  2. When a tag is blacklisted, any and all post that have said tag will not be accepted. While editing is allowed on locked questions by the moderators, subsequent edits to post with the blacklisted tag will remove the tag from the question.

As always please let us know if you have questions or comment on the details or procedures made in this post.

Answer 1

I found quite a few old questions tagged with identification-request that seem to not quite be questions of the type we're banning. For example, some questions asked for references used in a series:

• Who are these characters referenced in chapter 4 of Spotted Flower?
• Was the names of the hot springs in ep8 of Gugure! Kokkuri-san a joke/reference to another anime?
• Which characters is the cast of Youkai Shoujo - Monsuga cosplaying as in the chapter 31 color cover?

Some of the cases where the tag was used for character identification:

• Who are the three Homunculi that are with Irisviel and Saber?
• Who is this person with four eyes in OP song?
• Who is this in Fairy Tail?

(There were also some other cases, such as people wanted to identify an episode where something happened.) Would these be affected by the closure of all questions with the ID request tag (and if so, do we need to clean these up by removing the offending tag)?

Answer 2

status-completed: tooltip rectified, and line about the tag on the sidebar removed.

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I know this will probably be moot when the tag is blacklisted in about 2 weeks however when asking a question it still seems to imply we allow these questions

My suggestions would be

1. with the "how to tag" remove the id request part

2. we can probably do away with the first paragraph of the popup if not the pop-up entirely since if users were reading the links in this we wouldn't have had so much crap.

   an alternative is to alter the first paragraph saying that the tag is depreciated and now off-topic, linking to the necessary meta, something along the lines of

identification requests are off-topic and are in the process of being removed.

Answer 3

status-completed: I've removed the duplicate entry.

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This seems to be a bit duplicated:

Let's be sure to remove the bottom entry; since identification requests are explicitly no longer allowed, having a section that includes the proviso of it only being some form of media is unnecessary.

Answer 4

For those who want to start going though identification-request and start closing all the question which are still opened i have a search query one can use to return all the questions which aren't closed.

[identification-request] closed:no is:question

Hyperlink (sorted by newest)

so far the first 50 results i got also didn't show those that are on-hold so it should skip those which have been recently closed.