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A couple months ago, it was brought up that we should really figure out what to do about the outstanding [identification-request] questions. The immediate impetus for this was probably the realization that [identification-request] was showing up on the front page as one of our top tags despite being blacklisted. Thankfully, this was fixed pretty quickly. However, the question remains: what, if anything, should we do about the remaining id-reqs?

In this post, Logan proposes (as option #4) that they all be retagged to use the tag of the series in question, with the tag removed. For example, What manga is this image with a depressed girl from? would be retagged to . Gao posted another answer in support of this solution.

I propose that we implement Logan's solution. Note that this will require moderators to do all the retagging, since all the remaining id-reqs are historical-locked - but I'm willing to spend the time doing this, and the other moderators can of course spend the time if they'd like as well.

If, after a suitable length of time (say, a month or so), people are in agreement with this proposal, I'll start retagging the id-reqs (in small batches, so as not to flood the front page with crap).

This does make it non-trivial to identify the id-reqs that survived the Great Identification Request Cleanup of 2016... unless you use the power of SEDE.

Update (8 Feb 2017): Given that it's been a month and nobody seems to be opposed to this plan, I'm going to start retagging [identification-request] questions in small batches.

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    While this is difficult to go back from, I think it's a good solution
    – Toshinou Kyouko
    Jan 11 '17 at 10:28
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    This sounds good, but what do we do about ID requests that turned out to be original art, nonexistent series, or possibly, works that are off-topic for this site (e.g. if I asked an ID request that turned out to have Code Lyoko as the answer)?
    – Maroon
    Jan 11 '17 at 16:29
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    @Maroon Good question. My gut-feel is that there's few enough of those (10-20% is my guess) that we'd still achieve a sizable reduction in [identification-request] questions if we were to just exclude those questions while we implement this proposal. I think that this is a solution that we don't necessarily have to see through to 100% completion for it to be useful.
    – senshin
    Jan 11 '17 at 23:09
  • just want to confrim something. would this policy also apply to the id requests we currently allow? such as who is this character parodying or what is this reference from (example)
    – Memor-X
    Jan 18 '17 at 1:42
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    @Memor-X No, it would not. This strictly applies to the collection of historical-locked, identification-request-tagged questions we have. (That said, I have never been wholly convinced that, for example, adding [hokuto-no-ken] to the question you linked would be a bad idea. But that is a topic for another day.)
    – senshin
    Jan 18 '17 at 3:56
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It's done!

We started with about 396 [identification-request] questions; now, we're down to 27. The remaining questions generally fall into one or more of the following categories:

  • the identified thing was non-derivative, non-published content
  • the identified thing was porn
  • the identified thing was a one-shot manga chapter
  • the identified thing was Western animation
  • the answers offered multiple options, none of which was obviously correct

This is a huge improvement! [identification-request] is now only our 49th-most-popular tag (by number of questions), putting it well out of sight for casual passersby. I also removed all of the synonyms from the tag, to reduce the odds that somebody will find the tag while typing things into the tag-picker field when asking a question.

Questions affected by this retagging effort:

Run this SEDE query.

Tags created by this retagging effort

Run this other SEDE query. Note that this might take a while because I can't into efficient SQL.

There are going to be a few tags (on the order of a dozen or so) that are effectively created by this retagging effort that aren't captured by this query. This mostly happens in cases where the identified work's tag was added to the question (thereby creating the tag in the database) and then removed shortly thereafter, e.g. https://anime.stackexchange.com/posts/2379/revisions.

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