Meta-PokéBase Q&A
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Here we go, my next super-long discussion thread. Sorry these are a bit strenuous, but they’re at least something to keep you all busy. ;P

With the Q&A platform we have, our primary purpose is to provide responses to questions people have about Pokémon. This is something we will always focus on and base our policies upon. However, despite this, our rules and quality control don’t always align with this functionality. Some parts of the rules exist for different reasons. These are the things I want to discuss in this post.

Under our current rule system, we ban a lot of different types of questions. Let’s take some of these, for example:

  • We don’t allow in-game team questions in the RMT area — they create messy and subjective analyses of Pokémon that are often low quality and unenjoyable to read. Their worth is debatable, also.
  • Sometimes we/I take down questions because we (subjectively) believe they’re low-quality or trivial, e.g. ‘What are all the anime episodes Brock appears in?’
  • There’s a rule that says not to ask questions that can easily be looked up, since they’re not really producing any new content, and could be regarded as spam if you’re harsh. (Though I can see us doing away with this one quite fine.)
  • We don’t allow questions about non-official games, as these are often hard to research, or divert our focus to games our regulars might not play.

There is a commonality between these rules and others. It is that they prioritise the convenience of content to our community over providing answers to people who ask questions — often new users to the site. This goes against the purpose of our site to give responses to people with questions, but it does support the regulars by removing answerable or unenjoyable content.

For me, this is a dilemma of sorts — it blurs the line between content we should and shouldn’t allow. So in short, I want to ask...

When moderating, should we keep questions up to suit the asker or take them down to suit the community?

On this site, I think it would be agreed that we want to simultaneously create a community of regulars who enjoy using this site for its content, and a platform where any person could come and ask a question about Pokémon and get an answer. How do we achieve that, when these things are so often at odds with each other? Is there a side we take, or do we try to make a middle ground?

As things stand, I’d regard us as having a stronger focus on what the community wants. This is a culture that has built up in recent years — you can go back to posts from our early years and find tons of stuff we’d get rid of now. This shows there is workable content we still remove — it merely boils down to our preference.

My main issue with this approach is that it alienates new users who might come to us specifically for this content. It goes against the ideal that anyone can get an answer here, and I guess it restricts our community as well. It’s a question of whether it’s all worth it.

Is this something we should continue? Should we just focus on answering the question, and stop trying to fit everything in our mould of what good content is? Or, should we continue moderating content to suit our own preferences? To put this in different terms, does the experience of the person asking the question matter more than our regulars who’ll answer it?

I understand a lot of this is pedantic, but throughout history a lot of people have come to us confused or disappointed when their in-game team questions (and the like) end up getting hidden — we do take down a lot of them. For that reason I think it’s at least worth entertaining a discussion, in the interest of increasing our appeal as a community going forward.

Any thoughts? I guess that when the forum modification eventually comes to fruition, this topic would bring a more interesting discussion. Would any of the content like I listed above have any place here, now or in the future?

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I think the second rule in the bullet list shouldn't be enforced. If someone has a question that breaks one of the other three rules, then that person can get answers elsewhere (especially the one about being easy to look up). Extremely trivial questions, on the other hand, should remain allowed because answering those questions is one of this site's niches. (also, if they weren't allowed, then where would I get my up-votes?)
Sure, up-votes are good and all, but do you really care that much for them? I mean, they are good to get, except for down-votes.
The part in parentheses were a joke.
Think about why in-game team questions aren't allowed. It doesn't really matter what you use in-game. Every answer will be "whatever its fine" or something about type matchups.
"There’s a rule that says not to ask questions that can easily be looked up, since they’re not really producing any new content, and could be regarded as spam if you’re harsh."
It's with noting how extremely vague this rule is. Obviously something like "What type is Charizard?" should not be allowed, but what about something more complex and less known but can still technically be found easily through Google?
Can't say I have much of a strong opinion on the first three bullet points: I never venture into the RMT section or teambuilding in general, and the whole bit about "No trivial questions" is easily the least of all the offenses on the rules, so if the rule stays or goes, it probably won't make too big a difference. However, I am strongly opposed to the fourth bullet point about questions about unofficial games, for a couple reasons. First thing is that there are SO many of them. At least with officially licensed games, there's a countable, finite amount, albeit being pretty high, if you include all the spin off titles. With fan games, there's so many that there's a good chance that someone would ask about an obscure fan game that none of the regulars have heard of, and it'll stay on the Unanswered list for who knows how long. And those types of questions would build up, which leads me into my next point: There isn't enough information on all of them. Sure, the bigger games have fan-made wikis, but those are usually severely lacking information in many areas. With main series games, we have the benefit of having a whole bunch of sites with tons of active users and admins that are constantly finding new information and keeping all their old info up to date 24/7 (The DB, Bulbapedia, Serebii, Smogon, Azurilland, Veekun... the list just goes on), not to mention the countless GameFAQs posts and other miscellaneous stuff on all the games that gives us the best possible chance of answering any questions on here. With fan games, you sometimes have a Wiki, sometimes an active fan community, and a couple GameFAQs posts or something, which is almost always hardly enough to get basic information about the game (from my experience, at least). Of course, there are a couple of exceptions; the biggest fan games, like for example, Pokemon Uranium, typically have decent sized information repertoires. But if we just let those big games through on the site, what's to stop some medium sized game questions to trickle through? Then the more obscure ones? Then we'd be right back to the initial problem of having a bunch of questions about obscure games that nobody knows and that have next to no info online. And finally, like I mentioned earlier: a lot of these fan games typically have active fan communities, where those types of questions for those games are wanted and welcomed. So I think we should leave the fan game questions to the fan game communities and stick to the main series stuff.

I know I've probably rambled again so TL;DR on why we shouldn't allow fan game questions
1. Too many fan games out there for us to possibly know every question about every obscure fan game
2. Information on these games is typically pretty sparse to begin with
3. They usually have dedicated fan communities for those games that would be better suited to answering questions about them anyways.
I think we should allow ingame teams in the RMT section, considering;
1. New users won't get turned off by the site because they can't get advice
2. It will help promote RMT
3. It might help the site overall if users give more insights on their playstyles, criticisms, and advice.

Then again I barely have 10 points in RMT...
Ingame teams should be allowed as long as they're formatted the same and all information is included. If they don't look like trash, they're fine. There are often objective changes to make that could potentially make even an ingame team better (if the asker has too many water types, suggesting a specific ground type pokemon that can be found at a specific area in order to beat a line of gyms or deal with a difficult area that would also help generally) and we could help with that. We also could answer these subjectively, answering with fun alternatives, as long as the answer is still high quality and makes sense.

This relates back to a previous post, but if a question or answer requires a subjective answer, that should be fine as long as said question/answer makes sense and is well constructed.

The initial community around these parts was based around that early content. Reverting back to it (albeit a more streamlined, controlled version) is unlikely to hurt our community too much. If anything, it could add to it. It might be a point of contention and people might not like it but this current system isn't working either.
@PX Coludn’t have said it better honestly. This is the essence of what I want for these threads. I want us to break the mould and actually think about our traditions and attitudes. I feel like there exist posts that fit any of the listed categories that could work on this site, if we dropped the attitude and actually tried to make them work. In fact, with the ‘no unofficial games’ rule we already have done this, since Showdown questions are allowed. Maybe this is the extent of what we can allow for that one — Finchwidget summed that up for me — but I think it shows how blanket policies like the ones we have can be quite limiting.
@JarJar I pretty much agree with you here that there’s a lot of content covered by those rules we can’t allow here. I just think it’s possible to find some content within them that would be workable if we were more particular about the rules, so we can find a middle ground between allowing more content and keeping the site clean for the regulars to use.
I think if we added rules so that only good quality in-game team questions were allowed, they’d start getting much better answers than in the past. Similar with questions that can be looked up on the site — I’ve always disliked this rule for the same reasons you mentioned. It sucks to moderate. I think we’d be better off without it, instead taking down the dumb stuff on a case-by-case basis.
@Gekky I agree, there’s missed opportunity here for sure. The next thread I want to post pertains to the RMT section as a whole and I hope to discuss in-game teams that way. I’ll keep the discussion going on that.
@sumwun I guess it’s a matter of where we draw the line between interesting and practical trivia, and useless/ annoying trivia that gets in the way of everything else. Most of the stuff you post I don’t have particular issue with, but anything that requires excessive work for just a meaningless result promotes a type of content that I don’t think is healthy here.

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