Are “progress of specific anime dub” questions on-topic?

Question

While browsing for unanswered questions, I stumbled upon Are there any dubbed episodes of naruto shippuden After episode 388? Or its like they have stopped dubbing episodes?. Since I browse unanswered questions and new questions back-to-back, I suddenly remembered that there's a recent question asking the same, which was How many of Naruto Shippuden episodes are dubbed? and already answered.

This suddenly made me realize, that someone would ask the same question whenever they feel like there's no progress (as can be seen for Naruto dubs):

• Why did the English dub of Naruto stop?
• When will the Naruto: Shippuden English dubbed version resume production?
• How many Naruto Shippuden dubbed episodes are there?
• Naruto shippuden episodes
• Are there any dubbed episodes of naruto shippuden After episode 388? Or its like they have stopped dubbing episodes?
• How many of Naruto Shippuden episodes are dubbed?

Searching for more general questions on dub returned:

• Has there been an English dub release of Ghost in the Shell - Arise 3? (closed as "unnanounced future event")
• What is the status of the Valvrave the Liberator English Dubs?
• How can I find out when new English Dubbed One Piece episodes will be released?
• When will Fairy Tail (2014) be dubbed?

Some matters to be discussed:

• Are we okay with this kind of questions?
• Are they facing a dilemma of "already announced but no research" or "unannounced future event"?
• Specifically for Naruto, should we create a canonical post for this?

Answer 1

TL;DR: I would support the following course of action:

• Close all of these types of questions as future events.
• In the case of dub schedules:
  • Close them as a duplicate which generally talks about dub release schedules and where one can find them, but make it painfully clear that unless the specific publisher has said so, everything is to be taken as unofficial information.

---

I kind of wanted to think about this a bit more as it both pertained to us as a community, and the network at large. Specifically, I wanted to know if there was any "prior art" to address this issue, and as luck would have it, Movies & TV has had an issue with this in the past. As far back as their first draft, they explicitly forbid questions which pertained to release dates, or rumors thereof.

I'm not saying that the verbatim Movies' model would work best for us, but let's take a look at the questions we're presented with to see if they'd be something we'd even want to answer. Remember, we're setting these precedents for us; not because we want to stop users from coming, but because we want users to keep coming back.

Anyway...

• Why did the English dub of Naruto stop?

• When will the Naruto: Shippuden English dubbed version resume production?

  • The only reasonable answer(s) to these questions are, "money, time, and interest". All of this would have to be verified by someone in the industry, specifically closely working with the Naruto dub, which while isn't entirely outside the realm of possibility, isn't something that we here and now can answer.

• How many Naruto Shippuden dubbed episodes are there?

• Naruto shippuden episodes
• Are there any dubbed episodes of naruto shippuden After episode 388? Or its like they have stopped dubbing episodes?

• How many of Naruto Shippuden episodes are dubbed?

  • All of these questions can be independently verified by us, specifically by referencing official sources and Wikipedia. Yes, this means that one who asks this isn't really doing much research into this...it also makes the question more answerable as there's actually an answer that doesn't involve someone in the production cycle. I would rather not have to answer each question that gets asked about this though, so I'd encourage a canonical duplicate for that.

• Has there been an English dub release of Ghost in the Shell - Arise 3? (closed as "unnanounced future event")

• What is the status of the Valvrave the Liberator English Dubs?
• How can I find out when new English Dubbed One Piece episodes will be released?
• When will Fairy Tail (2014) be dubbed?
  • All of these should be treated as "future events" and closed as such. We don't know when these dubs will be released, if ever, and there's no satisfaction to be had when they're on our site, looking for a solution.

---

So, effectively, we're left with only one category of question that we could answer readily: the count of available dubs for a specific series. Now, the question is: do we really want to answer those questions? I've certainly done so on one that's listed, but if I'm honest, it's not a particularly insightful bit of information. Anyone can look at Wikipedia and conjecture a timeline similar to what I did, but that doesn't make it accurate.

That makes it dangerous; if someone were to use information sourced from this site, then not only do they look silly for sourcing an unverified sourcenot only is it a bad look for us as a community by providing incomplete information, but it also means that we haven't really done what we set out to accomplish in providing an insightful and valuable answer to someone who really wants to know this.

It seems like Torisuda's answer alludes to much of what I'm saying as well, but I'm going to take a different stance here. In my mind, we don't want to regurgitate readily-accessible information about series, and we don't want to have to maintain that sort of information when the official sources do a much better job of it than we do.

That said, I would support the following course of action:

• Close all of these types of questions as future events.
• In the case of dub schedules:
  • Close them as a duplicate which generally talks about dub release schedules and where one can find them, but make it painfully clear that unless the specific publisher has said so, everything is to be taken as unofficial information.

Answer 2

These questions annoy me, along with their spiritual cousin, the "When is Hunter x Hunter coming back?" / "When is Attack on Titan Season 2 airing" / "Is Mamotte Shugogetten getting a sequel?" question, but I don't know if they're a big enough problem to be worth banning.

Three major things annoy me about these questions:

• They have expiration dates. If Mamotte Shugogetten resumes its dubbing schedule on October 17th, 20XX, then the question becomes useless noise for anyone reading after October 17th, 20XX. (Unless they're doing research to fill out a "Dubbing history of Mamotte Shugogetten" section on Wikipedia, I guess.)
• They recur. If dubbing for Mamotte Shugogetten goes on hiatus again, someone is going to show up asking the exact same question: When is the dub for Mamotte Shugogetten going to start again? (Insert some series that people care about instead of Mamotte Shugogetten.) This new question is sort of a duplicate, but also sort of not, because we're talking about a new hiatus and a new resumption date for the same show.
• The only way to know if the question is answerable is to answer it. This is something that annoys me about the way we handle all newsy-type questions. I usually don't bother to review any of this sort of question because I have to do research equivalent to an answer to even know if the question should be closed or not, and it's easy to miss an announcement since some companies, especially US dubbing companies, make their release announcements weirdly hard to find.

Still, policy is policy, and even though these annoy me, I don't think they need to be stamped out yet. For now, I think we should treat them the same as other types of future event questions: close them unless there's an announcement or source that makes them answerable, and close ones that are asked during the same period as duplicates.

As for the recurrence problem, even though it irritates me to have multiple versions of the same question scattered all over the site, it seems like it would get very confusing to try and close them all as duplicates of each other. As I understand it, we should vote to close a question as a duplicate of another if it is completely answered by the answers to the other question. But if someone asks "When will Mamotte Shugogetten resume dubbing?" in 2017, and then it resumes, and then it pauses again and someone asks "When will Mamotte Shugogetten resume dubbing?" in 2018, then the answers to the 2017 question do not actually answer the 2018 question, so it seems wrong to close the 2018 question as a duplicate. Of course, someone could come along and provide a new answer with the new date on the 2017 question, but then we have answers giving a date for the previous hiatus mixed with answers giving a date for the current hiatus, which makes the whole post confusing to read, especially since the default is to order the answers by votes.

So for now, I recommend the status quo.