Lately I feel that the quality of identification-request questions has waned significantly. These most of these tip-of-my-tongue are without audio-visual artifacts, and rely solely on the asker's memories which are more often than not very unreliable.
I would like to ask the community's help on deciding whether we should creating hard guidelines for what these types of questions or eliminate them all together.
I present to you two options:
Option A: Set Guidelines
If we wish to keep that that we MUST implement and enforce some set of criteria to ensure that there is sufficient information to go on to be able to identify a series.
We should clear up any confusion on the subject of what a good identification-request should have. This would be added to the help center for visibility and reference. An example of a set of guidelines would be something like this:
An identification request should have as many of the following points as possible:
- Any description of the leading/recurring character(s) (i.e., physical description, behavioral, etc)
- Any description of any distinctive features (e.g., girls who a soda cans that do battle) or the setting
- What the genre or style was (e.g., mecha, sci-fi, fantasy, shonen, shoujo, seinen, etc)
- What the drawing/animation style is like
- When and where you saw it (If you saw it when you were a kid don't give you age, give the approximate year, and month if possible)
- Type of media: TV show, OVA, movie, manga, one-shot, etc
- Any image(s), audio, or video(s) related to the series
If the question has less than two of the the above mentioned criteria, or if the description given is deemed to be too ambiguous, it will be put on hold as "Unclear what You're Asking." You should edit your question to add more details, before it can be reopen.
Option B: Disallow certain identification-request questions without audio-visual artifacts
As for disallowing identification-request questions, I don't think we should needlessly disallow ALL such questions. Instead we can limit these questions to only those with some sort of visual-audio artifact component (in addition to images and clips of video and audio, rough sketches/graphics are acceptable).
Option C: Disallow all future identification-request questions
This option involves not allowing identification-request questions on this site and closing currently unanswered questions.
If you have another idea please feel free to leave a suggestion as answer.