With a new year, comes a new start. Throughout the past year, we've been pondering about better distributions of our current policies and what to do with specific questions. In the back of our minds, the music identification question continues to remain unpopular. The sentiment is mostly a mix of dislike and apathy. After much back and forth, we've finally decided to deprecate these questions in the community as they've become ever so unpopular.
The plan:
- Historic close on all music ID questions, list here compiled by Aki.
- Edit ID-request close reason to include a note and meta link about it (basically add a link to this meta post)
- Close all future music ID questions as we do regular ID-requests
What do we do about other types of identification questions? While these types of questions are unpopular. There's still meaning in identifying references within a particular series, franchise, or subculture as a whole. A recent example is: Where is this pool from?.
The above reference identification is a reasonable one as it is a recurring reference that more casual watchers/readers might be in the dark about. These things might be common knowledge within the more established or cultured connoisseurs of anime and manga content, but anime and manga these days are not as niche as they used to be. The proliferation of live-action adaptations (albeit of questionable quality) really shows that anime and manga are making strides to break the audience barrier these days. We hope to welcome some of the more neophyte consumers of the content, so allowing these types of questions with succinct references could be beneficial to more users than one-off questions about an uncertain clip of music.
However, questions like What's the EXACT Japanese subtitle font used in Evangelion Bluray? (already deleted) will be closed and require a statement of how this related to the topic of anime and manga as a whole before they can be reopened. The same thing with identifying things like cosplay, as not all cosplay is related to anime.
The reason why these questions are acceptable over questions like music identification is because the soundtracks aren't always available when a series premieres, sometimes the tracks remain unreleased and uncredited. Fans can give names to these tracks but rarely are they consistent about it. Oftentimes, these questions remain unanswerable until the particular season's soundtrack is released. Leaving them unanswered for a significant amount of time causes them to become lost and forgotten, eventually causing them to be buried until the Community bot bumps it.
Furthermore, references to timecodes seem to be all over the place as some watchers get their content from less than legitimate sources which may exclude content like openings and ending or localized sources which may edit the content to some extent, throwing off time code references. For the most part, we're not able to catch these nuisances or get the OP to respond to questions of clarification, so these questions are left blowing in the wind without a shred of attention to be made towards them.
While we're moving to depreciate these questions, we'll still be open to a venue to salvage these types of questions if possible (at a later time if something does come out of it), but only if there is significant support from the community to curate these music identification question, but personally from past feedback, the community as a whole doesn't see them as beneficial towards the community.
Please leave your thoughts and let us know what you guys think. We're looking to steer the community in a more favorable direction and clean up and streamline things in this coming new year.
