Are story identification questions still appropriate?

Question

Despite Jeff's latest SE Blog post, I think story ID questions should still be ok here.

I think there can be good and bad story ID questions, and while the bad ones can fall into the categories Jeff doesn't like, most of the ones I've seen here seem fine - they aren't guessing games and they can help others.

The issue of duplicates is easily solved (not that it seems to be a problem here), if there's a story ID question for a particular tale, and someone comes along later and posts a sufficiently different description of the same story, just edit the original post to include the new description and close the new question as a dup. That said, when you're talking about a story, there are unlikely to be multiple non-overlapping ways of relating the main features.

Jeff's comment about this type of question being unfair seems to be just another way of saying they're guessing games. Again, for story ID, most of the ones I've noticed give reasonable detail and the ones that don't give enough seem to get zero answers and so will be autodeleted at some point.

Basically, I think story ID questions should still be allowed here, but there should continue to be diligence in nuking bad story ID questions. Not just because they're story ID questions, but because they're bad story ID questions.

Answer 1

Story identifications will be banned on this site over my dead body.

To clarify: if this site was to ban story identification questions, I don't see it could possibly become a reference for SF questions. The site would be effectively dead to me. An SF Q&A site without story identification questions would hold no interest to me, and I would warn people away from it rather than recommend it.

Answer 2

I happened to look through the story-identification tag, and here are some statistics comparing it to the overall site and the top non-genre tags.

Overall site:

• 5,262 questions
• 276 questions with no upvoted answers, or 5.2% of the total
• 209 questions with no answers at all, or 4% of the total¹

story-identification tag statistics:

• 557 questions, or 10.6% of the total questions on SFF.SE
• 77 questions with no upvoted answers:
  • 13.8% of the tag
  • 27.8% of all questions with no upvoted answers
  • 1.5% of all questions on the site
• 51 questions with no answers at all¹:
  • 9.2% of the tag
  • 24.4% of all questions with no answers
  • 1% of all questions on the site

harry-potter tag statistics:

• 618 questions, or 11.7% of the total questions on SFF.SE
• 5 questions with no upvoted answers:
  • 0.8% of the tag
  • 1.8% of all questions with no upvoted answers
  • 0.01% of all questions on the site
• 1 question with no answers at all¹:
  • 0.2% of the tag
  • 0.5% of all questions with no answers
  • 0.02% of all questions on the site

star-trek tag statistics:

• 536 questions, or 10.2% of the total questions on SFF.SE
• 1 question with no upvoted answers:
  • 0.2% of the tag
  • 0.4% of all questions with no upvoted answers
  • 0.02% of all questions on the site
• 1 question with no answers at all¹:
  • 0.2% of the tag
  • 0.5% of all questions with no answers
  • 0.02% of all questions on the site

star-wars tag statistics:

• 498 questions, or 9.5% of the total questions on SFF.SE
• 4 questions with no upvoted answers:
  • 0.8% of the tag
  • 1.4% of all questions with no upvoted answers
  • 0.08% of all questions on the site
• 0 questions with no answers at all¹.

marvel-comics tag statistics:

• 259 questions, or 4.9% of the total questions on SFF.SE
• 7 questions with no upvoted answers:
  • 2.7% of the tag
  • 2.5% of all questions with no upvoted answers
  • 0.1% of all questions on the site
• 3 questions with no answers at all¹:
  • 1.2% of the tag
  • 1.4% of all questions with no answers
  • 0.06% of all questions on the site

lord-of-the-rings tag statistics:

• 175 questions, or 10.6% of the total questions on SFF.SE
• 0 questions with no upvoted answers.
• 0 questions with no answers at all¹.

^{Note 1: no answers at all is a subset of no upvoted answers}

Answer 3

I'm currently the all-time top user for the story-identification tag, so it's probably not hard to guess that I'm in favour of retaining it. It's by no means an arbitrary guessing game; many (although of course not all) questions have more than enough detail to uniquely identify the work that they have in mind.

Or in other words, the story-identification tag has good questions with unique and verifiable answers and bad questions that can't be answered based on the question. Which is the same as for any other tag.

If we're going to ban anything, let's ban questions that ask for in-universe answers, which either can't be verified as correct or could easily be rephrased to not be in-universe ("What is the textual evidence for...").

Answer 4

I am going to add a bit of a proposed policy to this.

If the OP knows the answer to the question when he is asking the question, then it should not be allowed.

Answer 5

I actually think that these questions are important even though there has been a rash of trolling lately. If you are looking for something and haven't found the information then why not ask a community that might help you find the answer. I do think that there should be more rules imposed on a identify this question and maybe they should be moved up on the privilege ladder since a lot of trolls are showing up. I only joined Science Fiction and Fantasy StackExchange because of a story identification question I had. I gave a good description and received an answer right away. I had been searching for years and now I have peace of mind on that question.

Answer 6

I happen to agree with Jeff Atwood's blog.

Case in point:

Story Identification: Young adult novel, horror, teens play a D&D variant, but things start to turn real

You can't complain that it's a poorly written question - Keith H Weston is a long time user and it shows that he put in a decent amount of effort to make the question as concrete as he could.

YET...

It has 4 answers (with 5 guesses between them), ALL wrong, yet some upvoted despite "no" comment from OP.

It's a guessing game. Pure and simple.