Story Identification : Close questions where the OP isn't helping?

Question

I noticed on Movie:SE that they have a rule regarding abandoned story-identification questions;

Identification questions are of limited use to other users of the site, and are asking people to spend some time identifying the Movie or TV show, so it is the responsibility of the person asking the question to try to answer clarifications within a reasonable amount of time, certainly within a day or so.

Identification questions may be deleted if it is considered that they are unanswerable and the person asking is not answering clarification comments. Questions from unregistered users unanswered after 2 weeks are liable to be deleted. Questions lacking in research, i.e. being easily answered from an actor's name on IMDB or Wikipedia, might get closed.

Should we have a similar rule here on SF&F:SE?

Answer 1

By metrics, this is a minor problem now, and could become a major problem in the future.

Story Identification questions account for nearly twice that of any other question type on the site, and are the only questions that are tracked by asked-per-week in the most popular tags. And the highest-voted Story-ID question has only two answers, both heavily downvoted. And hasn't received a new answer in weeks.

These aren't bad questions - some story identification has been very insightful, and that highest-voted question had over 100 votes, so there's clearly some interest in identifying stories. But, as more and more accumulate, there needs to be some measure of cleanup, and possibly some new rules regarding how Story-ID questions are handled to fight the inflation rate (read: possibly a topic for another Meta question).

Answer 2

No, I don't think so. They had a significant influx of Identification questions in their early days, so they established rules to get rid of some of them. We don't have that problem here; we have a healthy balance of questions of all manners, so there's no need to create special rules for removing some questions.

Answer 3

Yes, we should at least close them (and eventually, delete).

If the ID question is vague enough as to not be able to be correctly answerable, it's NOT a good fit for SE site, no matter how much fun it is for people to try to guess the answer.

They are absolutely no different from book recommendation questions:

• Please identify a book that fits {{this vague set of attributes, not enough to identify it}}

• Please give me a list of books that are like this book in {{this vague set of attributes}}.

The ONLY practical difference between these 2 questions is the story-identification tag.

Such questions fit BOTH of the close criteria:

unclear what you're asking
Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking.

and even more so:

too broad
There are either too many possible answers, or good answers would be too long for this format. Please add details to narrow the answer set or to isolate an issue that can be answered in a few paragraphs.

Answer 4

I agree with DVK, but I'd like to be a bit more specific and add some conditions. I don't think (or don't know if) these are enforcible through SE itself, so they're more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules.

• Age
  The question should be older than X days, for instance 7.
• Vote threshold
  The question's total score should be less than Y, for instance 3.
• Last reaction
  The last reaction by the OP shouldn't be too long ago, but I think it should depend on the age of the question and other activity by the OP.
  • If the question is still young, say under a month, I'd expect the OP to answer within 2-3 days.
  • For older questions, within 2-3 weeks.
  • If the OP has been active elsewhere on the stack since the request for clarification, or elsewhere on the SE network, one can expect them to respond more quickly than when they haven't been (possibly indicating vacation or otherwise AFK).
  • I'm not sure what it should mean if this question was the OP's only activity. It could indicate a drive-by question, but I'm not sure how to define that.
• Relevance
  Of course, not answering irrelevant questions shouldn't put a question in danger. I don't think the OP should have to dignify "what's your shoe size?" with an answer.

I think that questions too which these conditions apply, should be closed as "unclear what you're asking". This shouldn't even have to be confined to story-identification questions, but should be applied to all questions that are unclear.
If requests for clarification are not met, the question should be closed. Perhaps the close reason can be edited to include something to the effect of "requests for clarification went unanswered" or "despite requests for clarification".

Answer 5

I don't see it being necessary to have a specific policy for story ID questions.

The existing "unclear what you're asking" close reason can cover obviously abandoned questions where follow-up is needed but where the OP isn't providing it, but on the other hand, and if such a question is no longer being updated, I don't see any harm caused by leaving it open anyway.

Such a question will still be there to be potentially answered if someone knows the answer and comes across it while rep-hunting on unanswered questions. They're not cluttering the front page, abandoned questions will quickly fall off, and the rest of us can get on with the business of asking and answering questions, and managing the site within our remits.

In extreme cases where the question is really poor, as I said the standard "unclear" close reason already exists and can suffice. There's no need for anything more specific, and this is the same basic procedure as may be used for any other such question. But otherwise it would have to be clearly demonstrated that leaving these open is actively detrimental to the site.