Would it be productive to have a discussion here about the recent proposal on meta to close the identification-request questions? I don't want to be the sower of discord, but on the other hand maybe discussion can help us find common ground...

Based on this answer to an earlier proposal to close a subset of meaning questions, the new proposal seems to be coming from a sense of frustration with the state of the site

I sympathize with some of these frustrations: votes do accrue to easy answers on popular topics and not to difficult answers on obscure topics; the accepted answer does not always reflect the relative merit of the options; the hot network questions mechanism is arbitrary and capricious; and the user base consists mainly of programmers like me who read a book once

Hopefully all that is common ground. Where I part company is when it comes to the proposal, which, if I understand it correctly, is to attract scholars to the site by closing identification-request questions.

This plan, to put it bluntly, has something of an "underpants gnomes" feel to it—there is a missing step between the action (closing questions) and the goal (attracting scholars). Are there in fact any scholars who would like to participate on the site but are put off by the existence of identification-request questions? Perhaps their existence is obvious to the proposer, but it is not to me. Even one example of such a person would be worth having.

literature.stackexchange.com/questions/19655/… I can find several sources pointing away from the two authors cited in the question itself, and there seems to be a documented instance of the line appearing in a 1955 poem - is that enough for an answer?

literature.stackexchange.com/a/21696/11259 seems more like a comment on the accepted answer?