Should we offer a migration path to Anime:SE story-ID questions with scifi (or fantasy) content?

Question

Anime:SE have made a firm decision to reject any future Story-ID questions (regardless of the quality of the post or the information on offer) but do still get the occasional wayward soul who asks them and instantly gets shut down.

Given our solid track record of solving story-ID questions and their long history of acceptability on SFF:SE, would we be happy to offer a direct migration path for any anime story-ID requests that contain (or seem to contain) science fiction or fantasy elements?

For example;

https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/43280/help-i-can-t-remember-the-name-of-this-anime - (Contains giant robots and space goblins)

https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/43138/anime-related-to-angel-and-metal-sword - (Contains a character with angel wings that he can use during a fight)

etc etc.

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Instead of simply closing them with a terse message, their mods and users could then push any seemingly relevant ones over to SFF, subject to the same quality-control we usually apply to other migrated questions.

Answer 1

Yes, absolutely we should. SFF:SE should aim to be the home of science fiction and fantasy questions (including those related to anime, manga and animated films) and we should welcome any additional questions from our sister sites with welcome arms.

Points in favour

• It's been long-established that questions are on-topic as long as they contain scifi or fantasy, regardless of the format, so questions about anime, manga and animated films should pose us no problems.

• Anime's own users and mods will do some quality control for us, ensuring that inappropriate questions (such as those that don't contain any SFF content) won't get migrated over.

• The volume is not likely to be especially high (a few a week, from what I can tell).

• Happy users getting their questions answered will stick around on SFF and might ask other questions.

Point against

• Err. I can't think of any. Unless they start using us as a dumping ground for all of their Story-ID questions. Which I can't see happening.

Answer 2

This sounds like a great idea in general: if ID questions are getting closed over there that would be upvoted and answered over here, then there's no reason not to deprive those questions' OPs of getting their answers. That said, I'd mention a few caveats we should consider.

Quality control

I've never spent any time on the Anime & Manga SE, but having seen the type of non-book ID questions that some other SEs get, I'd guess that the quality of ID questions being posted to Anime & Manga was so bad that they eventually had no option but to cut out the canker entirely. We don't want our site to be flooded with crap and lose its reputation as one of the few SE sites to have mostly good quality ID questions without needing draconian rules.

To this end, I'd suggest not setting up a direct migration path which could be used by any five 3k-rep users, but instead relying on the A&M mods to migrate ID questions to us manually. Migration paths have caused issues for other sites in the past: e.g. see Please stop using SoftwareEngineering.SE as your toilet bowl and A friendly reminder: ELL is not EL&U's trash can. Unfortunately, allowing anyone to vote to migrate questions often results in really bad questions being dumped on other sites, essentially passing the buck on the job of closing them.

We should also bear in mind that "good quality" for ID questions is subjective and varies by site. Some sites have very different standards from others on what makes a "good" ID question. So we can't necessarily rely on A&M mods or users to know which of 'their' ID questions we'd want and which we wouldn't. The best way to inform them is by manually flagging migrate-worthy questions on A&M ourselves, with a flag text something like:

Since ID questions are off-topic here, could you migrate this question to Sci-Fi & Fantasy, where it would be considered on-topic and within SFF site standards? (Source: I'm an active user on SFF.)

I can't see any sensible reason for a mod to decline such a flag: if a question would be closed on their site but would be open and well-received on our site, then it's an ideal candidate for migration. This seems to be the best way to ensure that we get only the questions we actually want rather than being flooded with crap. The alternative would be educating the users or mods of A&M on exactly which ID questions we like and which we don't, and then potentially having to complain if they migrate bad ID questions which get downvoted here as well.

The decision on the other end

Of course, the ultimate decision of whether or not to migrate such questions is up to the A&M community and mods. They're the ones who have to do the actual migrating. But again, if they don't want the questions and we do, I can't see any sensible reason for them to refuse. Just remember that if you want a migration path, someone will have to propose that on their meta and get enough support for it there. (If we go by the manual flagging approach I suggested above, then posting on their meta won't be necessary unless for some reason those flags are declined.)

Answer 3

I would be fine with this idea but there are some things to understand first.

1. Given our solid track record of solving story-ID questions

   i know i'm cherry picking but as i said in a comment our ability to answer them was never the issue. i answered many myself, we've had users to get tag badges, we did everything under the sun to try and set a standard of quality with guidelines and asking that askers meet at least 3 points to make the id request uniquely identifiable which wasn't too much to ask? we posted this link everywhere, in the help center, in the tour, in the tags, in the close reason, in comments we would post, in the How To Ask.

   The problem was that many were just low quality. even when asked to provide more details many didn't respond. as per our close reason

   Identification questions are off-topic, because they tend to attract low-quality and low-effort posts.

   and it wasn't just questions, the answers i hate the most was

   it's [SERIES]. check it out it's great!!!!!!

   to me these are useless because they require the asker to have to look up the series. the rest of the SE Network wouldn't accept the answer "google/look up on wikipedia [search term]" and when it comes to id requests, and answer like that might as well been a guess. i thought it was easy for new users to make good id request answers by matching what was asked in the question to examples in the series but my faith was drained and i ended up changing my support for them because most new users didn't put in effort into their questions or answers

2. as per Valorum's post

   Be available to answer questions about it, and answer them in a timely fashion.

   this will only work if their user account get created here aswell as part of the migration.

   now i'm not 100% sure on the mechanics of migration but i think that if the asker is unregistered or isn't using a Stack Exchange Login they may not be able to even answer comments unless (for unregistered users) they create another account and post answers as comments or merge the new account tied to the question that ends up here.

3. while you have object-identification, scene-identification and music-identification these are still on-topic on Anime and Manga so long as

   • music-identification and scene-identification are coming from a known series (ie. what is this music/scene in [SERIES])

   • object-identification relates to iding objects within a known series (ie. was is that sword [character] was holding? what happened to their old one?) or merchandise

   
   that being said i would like to see a guideline or something of what could be migrated. ie, would you accept the following id requests if they had scifi/fantasy elements?

   • Image only id requests
   • Id this anime/music from this Anime Music Video (AMV)
   • Can you find me this AMV which has Scenes from [SERIES(ES)]
   • Id this hentai/adult doujinshi
   • How little is too little information?

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i'll finish off saying that i've always been amazed in how SciFi has never had a problem with ID requests like what Anime and Manga had. maybe it was because the community was larger. maybe it was because SciFi had more than enough questions from other topics to offset the id requests. maybe it's just that anime fans are shit and that when SciFi gets topped ranked for "id this anime" in google it would get into the same situation we got and question whether they should go.

Whatever it was, had we knew what secret SciFi is hiding in keeping id requests under control maybe we would have kept them.

Answer 4

Wanted to throw this in, since it's pretty relevant. SO has had some big discussions on it and I think this part of the accepted answer is relevant to all sites, as the question there was asking for open-ended migration options

The problem with allowing arbitrary sites to be entered is that a lot of the time, the community on one site has really no idea what is on-topic and considered of sufficient quality on another site. As such the Stack Exchange dev team has resisted adding a open-ended migrate option; the Stack Overflow community doesn't get to decide what is on topic in other communities, basically.

In other words, people would be too tempted to pull the lever to migrate. The danger is that SFF would become a "catch-all" for Story ID questions. It's also an easy way for them to pawn off questions that should have been closed in the first place.

Leaving it to just the Anime mods seems to be a better solution. Mods quickly learn what we do and don't accept, and can close questions that wouldn't be acceptable anywhere. I've had good success with this on SO, as mods like to salvage where they can.

It's also worth noting that any user with close privileges can close questions with a custom reason, so they can add a custom comment pointing them to SFF if it's off-topic on Anime. If you use AutoReviewComments it's easy to automate that. It then puts the onus on the user to register here and ask the question. This works better for the user, because now they can see comments and accept an answer (which we need for dupes). Migration cuts them off from that until they register here.