Suggestion: close "trivia" questions after they have been unanswered for at least one week

Question

"Trivia" questions are bad partly because they are often unanswerable, and the only way to know whether a question is unanswerable is watching it go unanswered for a while. I think one week is a reasonable amount of time to wait before deciding the question is probably not worth keeping on the unanswered list.

Comments

Absolutely

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Plus one 100%

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Those questions were getting flagged and closed immediately before I asked this Meta question. I don't know why 15 people think waiting one week is better than closing them immediately.

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I think I'm at the point where I agree with this, but I'd like to hear people's response to a couple of things. Does this rule mean that all trivia questions will be granted a week's "trial period", or can we anticipate which questions will be unanswerable before one week passes (as we often do at the moment)?
If the former, then I think a lot of low-quality questions are going to exist in the navigation before they are removed, which means the problem is only somewhat resolved. If the latter, then what is the point of making the "one week rule" common practice?
Furthermore, where is the line drawn with "trivial" questions? This rule effectively means that we will check every question that goes unanswered for a week to see if it falls under this subjective category. If the aim of this rule is to create an objective way of moderating these questions, then I am not sure it's successful.
I think a "one week rule" could be useful as a guide, helping us decide 50/50 situations. I'm not convinced it will help much outside of that.

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I like it

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The entire reason I asked this question is because I don't want people trying to anticipate things.
I don't think there are so many "trivia" questions that leaving them for a week will be a problem.
If the definition of "trivia" question really is subjective, can you come up with any rule that's more objective or consistent than this suggestion?

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> I don't think there are so many "trivia" questions that leaving them for a week will be a problem.
People certainly have been complaining about them though. This uptick in their frequency may very well happen again.

> If the definition of "trivia" question really is subjective, can you come up with any rule that's more objective or consistent than this suggestion?
I suppose my question is this: why are we trying to create an objective rule for a subjective issue? Is that possible?
In my view, this suggestion does not turn this into an objective problem, because it still involves making judgements of what questions count as trivial. Waiting for answers would sift things down a bit, but there will still be plenty left over for us to deal with by hand (and it also doesn't address that trivia questions can be bad to read even if they have answers).
I don't think there's a perfectly objective and consistent way to moderate this, so I don't think we should recoil at the thought of a subjective rule. We're staff because we're trusted to make the right decision when there are multiple options.
I gave it some thought, and I am a fan of something along the lines of "the asker must specify a particular purpose for any trivia/theory question, or they are subject to being closed at staff/community discretion". I think the lack of a purpose for trivia questions is the most consistent problem with them (which I may be wrong about), so I think this would be a slightly better rule. But it bears its own problems -- I wouldn't want it to be taken as "you are not allowed to ask something out of curiosity", and you could make a similar response to the one I made about your suggestion: can trivia questions be good to read even if they have no purpose?

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I feel like you're just trying to hide everything that you think other people don't want to read. Nobody knows exactly what other people like reading, so making too many subjective or case-by-case decisions will cause frequent arguments, many of which will be repeats. Rules exist for a reason.
If we agree that we want more rules and less case-by-case stuff (I think many people do agree, based on how many up-votes this got), then I think a good rule is defining "trivia" question as a question whose answer is technically already on Bulbapedia, but the answer still takes a long time to write. Questions that ask about a single game mechanic (such as https://pokemondb.net/pokebase/328747 ) should be allowed regardless of how long they remain unanswered.

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Finding out what people like to read was the whole point of that survey. :p
I think it's clear that people don't like "trivia" questions -- it's just hard to make a helpful rule on what counts as a trivia question. I absolutely agree that it would be best to have an objective rule; I just don't think a good one exists, and the best thing do in that situation is embrace the subjective element.
What I mean by "we're staff" is that we're here to have the final say on what does or doesn't fall under one of the rules. It's nice if we don't have to do that -- my point is that for these questions, we inevitably have to.
I think the arguments are going to exist even if we try an objective solution, because people like me will keep trying to poke holes through it. At least, if we accept the rule is subject to interpretation, we can just say "staff decision is final" (as much as neither of us like that).

The rule you brought up would be good if we were solving the exact problem of "questions whose answer is known but takes a long time to write" -- my point is that we aren't, and that description does not capture all "trivial" questions. For example, "What is the combined population of Hearthome, Jubilife and Veilstone cities in Platinum?" is an extremely trivial question, but you can answer it pretty quickly with Bulbapedia.
I'd also say some very practical and worthwhile (i.e. not trivial!) information could be described the way you did. (And, I'm not really comfortable adding a rule that is predicated entirely on what information is or isn't on Bulbapedia, as though Bulbapedia contains all Pokemon knowledge that exists.)

For the record, I do not think the question you linked is trivial whatsoever. That information has a clear purpose that will help solve a problem. In my mind, "trivial" is the antonym of that description I just gave -- and for our purposes, maybe with the "takes a long time to write" part tacked on the end.

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I was thinking about a specific kind of "trivial" question earlier and I'm wondering what others' thoughts on it are. "Game Freak logic" type questions might be an issue since if you don't know the answer, you don't always know whether or not there is an answer.

For example, let's say someone asked why Solgaleo wasn't a fire-type when he represents the sun. Well, maybe the answer is nobody knows and Game Freak just wanted it that way. That would be a pretty lame q&a. But let's say hypothetically there exists some interesting answer such as, "Solgaleo is based off of a mythical creature from this ancient culture that believed the sun was composed of spiritual brainpower, not fire." In that case this q&a is informative and worthwhile.

So with these "why is x this way?" questions it might be hard to know beforehand if the question is answerable since the question is essentially asking, "Is there an answer?" And if there is no apparent answer, then the answer just becomes "No" and the question can be answered as such. Would it be better to remove those questions instead of answering them with a no?

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@Fizz First, if the question can be quickly answered using Bulbapedia, that means some Bulbapedia editor thought the information was important enough to put on Bulbapedia, so there's a higher chance that some Pokebase users also think the same information is important. Second, if the question gets answered quickly, that means it quickly gets off the unanswered list and the front page. So relatively few people would read it and get annoyed, even if it was annoying to read. Third, we can just change "answer is already on Bulbapedia" to "answer is already on the web" if you think that makes the definition better.
@Hexahedron I guess we can use this same rule on Game Freak logic questions, but there were more people on the survey who wanted to completely get rid of them. We already hide other questions that are informative and worthwhile, like opinion questions.

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Not sure if this has already been brought up here, but I personally define trivial questions as the type of questions that make me ask myself "who cares?" If the information does not solve a problem, or the problem it solves is extremely niche, then I don't see the point in having it on the site. Questions that don't solve a problem would be things like, "What are all of the Pokemon that learn a Normal type move on level 32?" I know that's at least a bit of an exaggeration, I know that we have gotten questions that ask for information that is just as useful (which is not very, if at all) as the information the aforementioned question asks for. If the reason for asking a question seems to be "just because" instead of "this information is useful to me/may be useful to other people," then I think we should get rid of them.
As for what I'd define as a "niche problem," I believe that these are questions that ask for information that solves a problem unique to one person, such as "What are all of the Pokemon that evolve on [level]?" in the context that the person asking is making a list of Pokemon sorted by what level they evolve on. I personally feel like this also constitutes as a trivial question. The information it asks for can't be applied to any other situation that has any use, at least, as far as I can think of, and, on top of that, the information it requests isn't something that someone can obtain just by going to two or three Bulbapedia pages, (I'm assuming Bulbapedia doesn't have a page that has all of the Pokemon and the levels they evolve on them, but, if there is one, then pretend it doesn't exist for this example) it's something that would require going to the Bulbapedia page for a Pokemon from every evolutionary family.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that when there's a question like this, whether or not it says up should depend on how useful the information it asks for is, how easily the information can be obtained, and the amount of time it would take to do so. I feel like a timeframe would help us measure this. I feel like after a week or so, if the question hasn't been answered, or doesn't have any discussion regarding interest in the information/comments working towards a complete answer, that means that nobody is willing to put in the effort and time to answer the question, so it's not something we should keep up.

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I think usefulness is extremely subjective. "Last Pokemon for my team" questions solve an unique problem for one person, and we still allow them. As far as we can tell, there might be only one person in the world who wants to swap breed Nidoqueen and Nidoking, and we still allow that question. It would be simpler to ignore usefulness when deciding to hide these questions.

Answer 1

I would like to re-start the discussion around how we should handle trivial questions. For context, this is the rule we're speaking about (written after this thread was posted):

Requesting trivial or highly individualised answers that would not be useful to other people. Possible examples are "What are all the times ___ happened?" and "How can I do ___ in only this way?"

And the question that prompted me to revisit this: Which Pokemon die in New Pokemon Snap?

I hope people will agree that this is a low quality question and a trivial question ("pieces of information of little importance or value" per google). I hope people will also agree with me that this question is misplaced on PokeBase, whose goal is to catalogue useful and reusable knowledge and advice.

Clearly, one person cared enough about the answer to post the question. However, in my view, the niche interests of one person should not at all times decide what content will be on PokeBase.

If we can agree on the above -- which we may not, and you should say so if you don't -- then the solution given in the OP has a problem. We're not just concerned with whether these questions are answerable; we're also concerned with the fact that they suck. With the approach taken by the OP, this sucky question will exist forever as long as it is answerable.

Rule 1.4.4 is an attempt to describe what makes these questions suck: they ask for trivial information that isn't useful to other people, or lacks some applied purpose. If you squint your eyes, you can see how "Which Pokemon die in New Pokemon Snap?" is really just asking "What are all the times ___ happened?".

The point I tried to get across last year is that deciding which questions are "not useful to other people" is always subjective in some way, and part of our role as staff is to make those subjective decisions. The rule tries its best to describe what questions are problematic -- as long as we stay close to what it says, then we can remove sucky questions when we see them and hopefully still avoid upsetting people.

Does this sound reasonable to people, or does everybody prefer the "wait a week" approach? Is there something different that should be done?

Comments

I would also add to this that if the asker of that question were to explain why dead Pokemon in Pokemon Snap are in fact helpful to know about, then I would have zero problems with the question. However, the onus really is on the asker to explain the purpose of the info they want whenever that isn't a direct implication of the question.

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Did we already ask about this issue in a moderation survey?

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We asked for general opinions on trivia questions like this one in the 2021 survey. The response was negative overall. We haven't specifically asked what the best way to moderate them would be, though.
Again, if anybody has an opinion on this, we'd like to hear it. I made this post publicly specifically because we want to hear from people who aren't staff as well.

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I think that a lot of the people who are asking these questions, (including the OP of the question being discussed,) are new users that have not read the rules or do not understand the rules. These users tend not to put descriptions in their questions, which makes me believe they are asking questions off of a spur of a moment thought or idea they have. Many users are repeat offenders, like the OP in the question discussed.

 I feel like these questions should be blocked by the editors and mods and sent back, with the message that this kind of a question is extremely trivial and individualized, and OP could do one of two things. Either they could look at the form and fit of normal questions being asked, and realize that questions need to be above a certain standard of cleanliness, urgency, and interest, or they could continue attempting to post BS questions that will be blocked by editors/mods.