@LoganM I don't particularly care whether it stays open or is historically locked. It should be kept either way. But if it sets a wrong example to new users, then we should go for a lock.
@JNat In other words, it's too early to tell if that question will attract a lot of bad answers. But from my experience on SO, I think it will. And at some point - if we decided to keep the question, it should be protected.
Generally speaking, it's pretty easy to see whether a question will attract garbage in the long run.
I don't have an objective criteria for determining this, but I can usually just look at a question and get a good feel for whether it will be problematic.
Here's a rather extreme example of a problematic question that attracts garbage:
Yesterday I was pairing the socks from the clean laundry, and figured out the way I was doing it is not very efficient. I was doing a naive search — picking one sock and "iterating" the pile in order to find its pair. This requires iterating over n/2 * n/4 = n2/8 socks on average.
As a comp...
There is an exception to this do-not-delete shit answers rule though.
On the extremely high profile questions, I've seen moderators purge shit answers.
Mostly to keep them from chipping away at the quality of the question.
At the size we are right now, it will take a moderator to delete shit answers. So that'll be a problem. But perhaps we can do some informal vote-to-delete either here or on meta to get rid of problematic answers.
Or course right now we don't have that problem, but if we manage to pull off any real publicity, then it might be.
@Madara, @JNat, @LoganM: regarding this question - questions asking for lists are not necessarily list questions, which are questions intended to generate lists (and oftimes unbounded ones). I wrote about this a while ago on MSO - basically, you're better off referring to the FAQ and related blog posts when trying to decide if something is constructive or not.
That said, you'll want to be clear that you differentiate between questions seeking to learn how to fish and questions that are... just fishing. IMHO, this one could easily be turned into "how can I find animes on a given topic?" or "What's a good Zombie anime I should read?" - you want the former, not the latter.
@Mysticial one of the mods mentioned it in another room, and then Robert happened upon the question.
@Shog9 For all practical purposes, this is a recommendation question. He didn't explicitly ask for recommendations, but the answers would be the same as if he asked "What zombie anime should I watch? I watched HOTD and liked it, but it had too much fanservice for my tastes."
@LoganM Like I said, you could go two ways on that question. One involves everyone just listing their favorite zombie books. That may be what he wanted, but it's not a good or constructive question. The other option is that he's looking for an existing list of all zombie anime. In theory, there can only be one complete, finite set of such at any given time.
That said, you're not necessarily the ones to provide it directly - however, @LoganM your comment suggests that such a need is not only common, but has a common solution.
I wasn't in favor of closing it, but I accepted the community decision and took it as a precedent that asking for external resources about anime/manga, rather than anime/manga itself, is OT
If you think you'll only ever see a handful of questions from folks looking for new material, it doesn't really matter. But if this is a common desire, then you'll save yourself a ton of frustration in the future by creating a resource now that you can hand such folks... Instead of just responding, "List question, goodbye"
If we are going to do this, I'd suggest maybe asking one canonical question "Where can I search for anime of a particular genre/type" and linking to MAL, AniDB, ANN encyclopedia, etc. Then we can close all the new ones like this that pop up as duplicates.
The point, though, is that we haven't been allowing questions about external resources about anime, e.g. the currently airing question. Should we allow that or do we want to keep this focused on anime specifically?
FWIW, I've never seen such a question on scifi.SE, which is the example I was trying to follow here
@LoganM maybe there should be a post that links to external links on these subjects (lists of genre animes, list of airing animes, etc), and it should appear on the faq, preventing questions on such matters to be asked
Thus, this questions that have been closed as Not Constructive, would all somehow fit in there
Crazy. I was with you until the "they may crucial to bring in users" bit. Puhleeze... This site will have no trouble attracting an early audience. The worst thing that can happen here is drive towards "we'll worry about quality later." A new site is evaluated for having a strong start with quality content, much much much much much much more so than having the largest possible audience. If these questions will harm the site long-term, don't allow them. You're here to build a strong foundation now... for the long run. Don't fall for these games just to pump up your numbers — bad idea. — Robert CartainoDec 13 '12 at 0:07
@Mysticial I don't really agree with that comment. I was part of the failed Theoretical Physics beta, which had by far the best content I've ever seen on an SE site, but died because it couldn't bring in new people. The quality was actually part of the problem-new users, even postdocs, were intimidated by professor-level research questions.
because if you have a question asking for a list of every genre of anime and manga, you'll have a series of answers that will, most likely, all lead to the same site (MyAnimeList or something like that)
So we'll have a lot of answers, each for a genre, but all linking to the same site
1. Shog seems to be wanting us to relax the definition of "not constructive". 2. "This site will have no trouble attracting an early audience." - That is sooooo wrong. We **are** having a trouble getting an audience.
@JNat There's a strong feeling that a preponderance of these questions (vs more meaty lit analysis questions) killed Literature and have harmed other sites.
The solution to the audience isn't getting lax on what sorts of questions you allow. It's not driving away folks who show up and ask the first stupid thing that pops into their heads.
Y'all know better than to ask, "what zombie anime should I buy next?" - y'all know where to find the info to decide for yourselves. So figure out how to get new folks up to that level & then they won't hate you if they have more interesting questions.
@Shog9 I guess because for most of us it is a no-brainer, and we all know where to find it, and that it would either create a list or a link-only question
@JNat So here's something to consider: when someone's asking for a recommendation, it's not because they can't find the stuff - it's because they've no idea how to evaluate it. So they see y'all here, purporting to be experts, talking about obscure series they've never heard of, and think, "these guys'll know what I'm talking about"
he thinks you're the kid at the video rental shop who's watched every movie in the place and will happily recommend one based on another one just to have someone to talk to.
For instance, if I asked for a list of movies directed by Miyazaki (forgetting that he'll probably make a few more before he dies), I think that would be an OK question. Admittedly one that could be answered by google in about 3 minutes, but so can lots of questions here.
@Mysticial Personally, I don't think this is any different from the zombies. The only reasonable way to answer it is to link to some other database that you can search.
@Mysticial AFAIC all those are the same type and should, as I've been saying (don't mean to be repetitive), be condensed in some 'general reference' post, which would point to external resources on these questions that are regarded as Not Constructive
and said post would be modified along the way whenever a new question that is not 'included' in it appears
In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, there is some strange rune writing that is used a lot. I've heard that it references Goethe's Faust, at least in the first few episodes, and it's used in displaying the names of the witches as well. Is there any comprehensive guide for what each symbol means, or a li...
Here's a possibility: Allow list questions that: 1. Ask for a specific list. 2. The the items that belong on that list can be determined objectively. 3. The list isn't too long. 4. The list isn't changing.
2
@LoganM Well, what about, "What are the Anime that feature the Index/Railgun universe?"
There's only 4 of them.
Granted, it's a bad question that can be easily googled.
@Mysticial I wouldn't treat that as a list question, because you need more information than just the 4 anime. You also need to know how they are related to each other.
As for your recommendations, 1. should be required for all questions, and 2. is obviously necessary for any list question. 3 and 4 I'm not as convinced by.
3 and 4 I'm a little unsure about myself. 4 isn't a real problem. The answers will get wikied after a while. But that's what it's for. 3 could be problematic as we'll end up with multiple partial lists.
If the question is actually interesting, there should be somewhere not on our site which lists all of them and keeps the list updated. We just need to link to that.
If the question isn't interesting, then there's no need to include it
Quality is what downvotes are for. The only reasons I can see for banning this is that it's OT or too localized. For me NC is for when the question isn't likely to be answerable.
I was of the opinion that we decided all questions asking for external resources were OT. An answerer could provide external references to construct their answer, but the asker couldn't ask for such. Which is a little bit confusing tbh
Note that we are currently debating the status of "list questions" in chat right now. So there's a chance that we may re-categorize this question on-topic and constructive and reopen it. — Mysticial12 secs ago
^^ Thought I'd add that to try to encourage the guy to stay.
The only problem with it is that there are a lot of answers, which are all valid, but one could also construct a lot of lists of zombie anime which are all valid.
@Mysticial good, but I'm not convinced the problem with this question is that it's a list question.
Well, let's run down the 4 categories I listed for "currently airing" question. 1. Yes it's a specific list. 2. Yes there are objective answers. 3. No, the list could be very long. 4. No, the list will be changing.
The problem I have with it right now is that it's basically soliciting recommendations. He isn't actually asking for such, but the practical effect is the same.
I don't think the problem with this question is that it's a list question at all. The problem that I see is that recommendations aren't allowed, whether they are list or otherwise.
This is a particularly tricky case where he isn't actually asking for recommendations, and probably doesn't realize that what he's doing is equivalent.
If I had free rein, what I would do with this question is turn it into something like "Where can I search for anime of a particular genre?" which I'd then think is a fine question.
But the currently-airing question was closed and it's rather similar, so apparently that's no good.
In any case, the main reason I voted to close that question is because it seemed to be a special case of the other question, which was banned, so this one should be also not allowed.
I don't think it's good to allow such a question for every genre, but I see no problem having one generic one and closing all the new ones as duplicates.
I'm fine with reopening the currently airing question, but I'm still a bit iffy on the zombie one... I get the points made but I'm not sure new users will.
The main motivation here is this question asking where to find a list of currently airing anime, including date and time. It can be seen as a polling question (well, really, it is) and might come a cross as subjective, as there may be multiple valid answers, of which you might choose one by prefe...
Good, you can follow up there and go into detail about the sort of questions you see as non constructive (and why), off-topic (and why) and allowable (and why).
Once we get all the mods to agree, we'll have one of them make an "authoritative" summary answer with a link to the chat transcript. Then we'll see how everyone else responds.
@Mysticial I agree. Unfortunately, I don't have any better suggestions, and I really should be getting offline soon. Maybe someone else will have a suggestion, or we can continue this discussion when more people are here.
@Mysticial I think it varies depending on the type of list... If I were to ask about all the major factions within the magic side and the science side, that can be answerable, but if I were to also ask for a list of their members wouldn't it be a bit too much?
Yesterday I was pairing the socks from the clean laundry, and figured out the way I was doing it is not very efficient. I was doing a naive search — picking one sock and "iterating" the pile in order to find its pair. This requires iterating over n/2 * n/4 = n2/8 socks on average.
As a comp...
