Suggestion: Ban specific, irrelevant anime questions

Question

I realize lately we've been getting a lot of questions regarding "Has insert specific thing here ever happened in the anime?" For example, the most recent is, "has Volcarona ever been ridden in the anime?"

I think these questions should be banned because they are usually irrelevant and unanswerable without watching multiple seasons of the anime.

I understand this would be difficult to do, because this site is a Pokemon site, not just a Pokemon games site, but these ridiculous questions that are surely just kids having a question pop up in their head and then going "Huh I better ask that that's a GREAT question," needs to stop. I'd be happy to compromise

Comments

Is this a real issue? Looking at the anime tag list I don't see many recent questions like that, and those that are overly specific or trivial are just covered by Rule 1.4. I personally don't really think this needs to be a "rule", seeing as the people that would post this type of question probably wouldn't listen to it anyways (so again, we can just use 1.4 to cover these cases).

Answer 1

Thanks for raising the topic. There is precedence for this (which we now consider part of rule 1.4 as WilloWisp mentioned).

The question you're talking about is bad and I wouldn't argue if someone else closed it. But I wasn't motivated to close it personally -- it's just a yes or no question.

But, if a lot of people agree that question should be closed, then we'll start handling similar ones more harshly.

Comments

What about questions like "Has x scene ever happened in the anime"? They don't break any rules as such and not trivial too. If it's stuff like "Pokémon eating scenes" and all, I guess that'd fall under a low-quality questions, but the others right now seem fine.

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Those questions plain out seem unanswerable unless someone remembers the exact anime scene, and no one would go through 1000+ anime episodes for that. How did you answer Raven Roth's anime scenes question?

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I'm the best.

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@Carnelian Depends on the exact question. Personally, I think it's possible to answer a question like that by saying "I tried x, y, z searches and found no evidence it exists" -- not a great answer, but if you want a better answer you should ask a better question.
I would describe that question as "trivial" actually, just not to the degree that it's unanswerable.

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I changed my mind regarding that question. Here are some factors to consider with these "hyper specific" questions, which led me to doing this:
* PokeBase is supposed to have re-usable questions that other people will find helpful. Is the question likely to be used by other people?
* PokeBase should be for getting knowledge/advice from people who have more experience than you, know more than you, or know better than you where to look. Is anybody on PokeBase in a better position to answer the question than the person who asked it?
* Is the question likely to get a good answer? (Ex: How awful will it be to get a confident answer?) I sounded like I was OK with a compromising answer (read: bad answer) in the previous comment, but on second thought that's a telling sign of low quality content.

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Regarding the second point, we could also view questions from the perspective of "why would anyone really want to answer this?" People answer questions completely out of their own will, so in the case of highly trivial posts, it begs the question of "would anyone answer this, *especially when the OP has the most curiosity about it out of everyone*?" Unless the post is useful to many people, the answer is most likely no.

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* Questions as such would most likely not be reusable -- they're mostly asked out of curiosity and very few people would share the want to get the episode of a scene.
* In my opinion, some people can move ahead to answer these anime questions. It's not very difficult, it *is* about looking at the right place. Not very difficult to get episodes of famous scenes.
* I was a bit off too with what you suggested in your previous comment (about bad answers being acceptable). I feel it's better now.

@xPsydxck If a question is answerable, I don't see why anyone who can answer it refrain from doing so if they have the time. It's a very easy way to gain points, too, for newer users, an internet search is what it requires. The answerer can also have curiosity about the anime, the so-called "weebs" can better answer these questions too.

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@Carnelian Time and motivation are the main issues, you see. For example, I answered this ( https://pokemondb.net/pokebase/375662 ) question even tho it took 4+ hours because I wanted to create a comprehensive list which we can keep updating down the years. That's helpful for many people. But a question like "what are all the Pokemon with teeth" doesn't seem to attract anybody. No one would bother answering that. Sure, people could answer such questions for meaningless internet points (which is a reason in itself, but then again, people have other stuff to do) but that isn't helping anyone.

Also, I was talking about highly trivial question in general, and not just highly trivial anime question. My apologies if I didn't clarify it enough initially.