Suggestion: Allow only important questions.

Question

First i would like to say that this is an amazing community and the people here does a great job.

My suggestion is because important questions are helpful and useful, and usually have much more accurate and reliable answers, are easy to be answered, since there are many good sources regarding for example a game mechanic, game news, how some items work and many others of the alike, and is all useful.

But non-important questions will not help in any way and most of them doesn't even make sense, some people may say that some of them may have "good answers" but this is incredibly minority and even having good answers (Things that for thoose kind of questions i disagreed but respect the opinion of others) is still not helpful or important in any way. Most of their sources in answers to non-important questions are not good, mostly because the majority are guessed, or found in not trustyworth places where someone just guessed before them or made-up, since the official companny almost never say anything about what people will say "is gamefreak logic" or "Why gamefreak does this?", "Why this pokémon is blue and not Yellow?", "Why Pikachu has pointed years instead of circular?", Things like that. There is almost no way to have a reliable answer to thoose questions, the "right answers" to thoose questions. And make no point in having guessed answers.

Some people may like because of curiosity, and curiosity can be very usefull and important giving the situation but not in this scenario. This scenario requires reliability about something that is almost impossible to find and also not useful.

And the other reason is because many of thoose non-important questions are clearly nothing more than people spamming questions to farm upvotes.

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This is my humble suggestion to help, and again, my opinion about this website is incredibly positive, this website is very useful, helpful, easy to use, the people here does a very great job.

Thanks all for your attention, i bid a good day for everybody!

(Sorry for my grammal errors, english is not my maim language)

Comments

The purpose of Pokebase is to answer questions about Pokemon. If a question is about Pokemon and can be answered, then it should be answered. The person who asked the questions is responsible for deciding how "important" his/her/its questions are. You can ignore whichever questions you want, but you have no right to prevent people from receiving answers just because their questions don't look "important" you, or demand that everyone defend the "importance" of their questions.
Note that this is just my attempt to explain what I think of the concept of a QA. I'm not trying to defend any of my actions in any way here, because I understand that my questions often can't be answered.

> many of thoose non-important questions are clearly nothing more than people spamming questions to farm upvotes.
Why do you think the problem is in the questions? The people asking the questions aren't up-voting themselves (or at least shouldn't be). The only people you can really blame are the people giving those up-votes to those bad questions. Besides, you have more than 80 points on Pokebase, right? Can't you just down-vote anyone who you think is "farming up-votes"?

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Dear Sumwun, half of the people in the moderation already talked to you several times about your actions on my stuff and you keep doing it. I have the answer for everything you brought up, but i will not talk to you for the reasons you already know, hope you understand, have a pleasant day!

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Why do you even ask questions that can't be answered? But anyway, useless and or trivial questions are definitely somrthing that should be ruled off. The point of Pokebase is to ask questions about Pokémon - I agree, but "How many tiles in Pokémon are concrete?" isn't a question, it's a needless statement that the asker has no tangible gain from and the responder has no way to easily answer the question.

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I'm only trying to explain why I hate this suggestion. I'm not trying to defend anything I did. I understand that my questions can't be answered. If I really needed to, I would rather hide all of my questions than let this suggestion pass.
@Rick If you really want me to explain myself, I guess the best explanation I can write here is that sometimes I get curious about something, and I ask it here in hopes that it might get an answer. Nothing really bad happens to me if I get no answers or my question gets hidden, so the tiny chance of getting a real answer is still worth it.

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Well, we already don’t allow near-unanswerable questions that don’t have any practical application, but while a lot of the “Game Freak logic” questions fall into this category, some of them can have a good, definitive answer (for example, https://pokemondb.net/pokebase/303711/why-isnt-dragon-ascent-a-dragon-type-move ).

Answer 1

I agree with what you're saying to a large extent. I've pushed before for the tightening of rules in this space (see the eighth rule), but I may as well go into some detail so it's very clear where I sit with this.

I'll make it clear that I don't believe we should moderate based on a subjective measure like the 'importance' of a question. Different people will value content in different ways, and you're already seeing that in the discussion on this thread. Part of moderating is creating a compromise has something in it for everyone.

However, I would be the first to advocate for the quality of content on this site: and in every sense except what it says on the rules page, we are already acting upon content we think crosses the line. I can tell you with absolute certainty that every one of us would remove 'Why does Pikachu have pointed ears?' the moment we saw it. If you are finding content that is of similarly low quality, then you should flag it so we can remove it faster.

The issue here is the difficulty of making a hard-and-fast rule for what counts as 'low quality'. Ultimately there's going to be variance whenever we try to make a distinction that is too simple. So instead, I'm going to specify some factors that will affect the decision that is eventually made for each thread. Make of them what you will.

• The question is more likely to stay up when the prompt refers to something that was designed mindfully by the developers. For example, 'What is the origin of Marshadow's name?' is answerable even if it isn't definite: you can make a comprehensive response by listing possibilities and making an educated guess. On the contrary, I can't even prove that Alolan Sandslash's inability to learn Ice Beam is by design, let alone justify it.

• The question is less likely to stay up if it's labour-intensive or choring to give an answer to. Sorry to pick on individuals like this, but posts like this one are too good an example to pass up. This has overlap with the 'hyper-specific questions' wording we've started using, and also the next bullet point.

• Questions that encourage reasoning and explanation are more likely to stay. The best content here comes up when someone explains how a mechanic works, how to achieve something, why something is better than another, etc. This type of stuff triggers voting actions, follow-up comments and varying answers, all of which engage on a higher level than listing something or providing a statistic.

• You're a worse chance for any question where the boundaries are undefined, the meaning isn't clear or the answer could be given in many ways. In summary, anything that is vague. As above, we like dialogue and multiple responses: but not when it's because we interpreted the question differently, or tried to quantify something subjective. Fundamentally, the issue here is the same as with opinionated questions: this platform only works if we can agree on fact and then justify it, or use it to prove a point.

All of this is very much open for discussion -- any formal ruling here is still very tentative, and I don't expect everyone to agree with me on this. Fire away; I reckon this issue is worth talking about.

Comments

I think questions that are considered "low-quality" or "pointless" or whatever should stay up for a week before people start arguing whether or not to close it. If it gets a good answer within that time, then that's one less question we have to worry about.