I guess it's appropriate to start with the elephant in the room - story identification questions. Should they be on-topic here?
In particular, what can we learn from the previous iteration of the Matrix? What can we learn from Anime & Manga banning identification questions?
If we decide to accept such questions, what are the basic requirements for them?
Identification questions are like... The cabbage, radishes and shredded carrots that some sushi shops put on the platter before stacking up the meat & rice. They make the plate look nice and full, and they're something to chew on once you've eaten all the meat...
...But no one goes to a sushi restaurant for shredded carrots. I've never heard a group of friends walking out while patting their bellies and saying to one another, "boy howdy, the salmon was ok but those radishes - what a sublime delight!" And going through the stack of menus in my drawer, I cannot find a single one that advertises the quality or quantity of shredded carrots.
We tried this Literature thing once before. It's not as easy as you might think: everyone reads, but fewer people study and fewer still have the combination of encyclopedic knowledge and analytic skill to answer the sorts of questions that are not trivially answered by a Google search - and fewer still know how to ask such questions well. Literature as an collective noun is as common as mud; literature as a discipline, as a pursuit, much less so. The topic for this site is both extremely broad and extremely deep, and there's a very real danger that we won't be able to attract a large enough or diverse enough membership to do it justice...
...which is where ID questions can be useful: something for folks to chew on while they're waiting for the next question about the set of obscure authors to which they've dedicated their study. Like those slivers of carrot, such questions can potentially give answerers something to chew on while they're waiting for the meat...
...But you still gotta have plenty of meat.
The last time we tried this, we ended up with mostly bland vegetables: ID questions, reading lists, etc. Folks enthusiastically defended them, until they realized that they were bored and so was everyone else; the site was shut down because pretty much everyone left. There was no traffic, no new thought-provoking questions or meaty topics... Just an increasingly dusty pile of limp trivia that had been chewed on and spat out.
If this site gets a tiny handful of ID questions, just enough to fill in the gaps between more interesting and useful questions, they'll probably be fine. But if a majority of questions fall into this category, it becomes quite unlikely that the site will survive.
And, let's be honest: if the site takes off, y'all will want to get rid of ID questions anyway simply because when there's plenty of meat they're a distraction, keeping them around doesn't help anyone, and the folks who ask them don't stick around to help anyone else.
You mean SciFi & Fantasy. Yeah, they do ID questions. Here's a graph of the percentage of questions asked each month that are ID questions, for the entire history of SFF:
(This includes deleted questions)
Two things you should note there:
For nearly the first two years of the site's life, they kept the percentage of ID questions below 20, and most months there would've been around 9 non-ID questions for every single ID question - even less during the first month.
They've never had more than 30% ID questions in a given month. Not a single month in the history of the site.
Contrast this with sites like Anime or Movies, where ID questions quickly became the majority of questions being asked on the site, and you can start to understand why SFF can afford to take a more laissez faire approach here; their diet is still mostly meat, while the other sites dealing with these questions are looking over hungrily from their big heaping plates of napa cabbage.
You don't have to go out of your way to shut down ID questions as soon as they spring up, as long as they're rare and well-written.
But if you're reading this, it's probably a bad idea for you to ask them yourself; if you want to help this site grow, give its members wholesome food to chew on.
And if, in a week or two, you survey the site and see an awful lot of ID questions... You should probably start getting worried about malnutrition.
You may want to sit down. This is going to be long.
Unlike, say, literary analysis, or questions about plot points in specific works of literature, identification questions are almost always inspired by an actual problem someone needs to solve. In this sense, they fit the Stack Exchange model better than many other questions about literature are likely to! From the help centre:
You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face.
ID questions fit all of this to a tee: people usually post them because they actually want to find a book they've read before, perhaps so that they can reread it. By solving these questions, we're helping people in a bigger way than just satisfying their idle curiosity. OK, we're never going to be like Stack Overflow or Maths SE where people's jobs might depend on getting answers to the questions they post there, but any amount of practical help is better than none, right?
Plus, not only are they helpful to the OP, but believe it or not, they're helpful to other people too. I gathered some statistics on this a while back from the Science Fiction & Fantasy SE, which is probably the best existing analogue to Literature, being the only other SE site where questions about fictional books can be asked.
All of this shows that a significant proportion of the 8500 ID questions on SFF are useful enough that people actually post duplicates or non-answers to them. Of course there must be many more ID questions which people simply read, think "aha, that solved my problem", and don't post anything to that effect on the site.
Let me address head-on the complaint which many people from other SE sites are likely to have. On Movies & TV, for instance, most of the highly active users see ID questions as the bane of the site: that site gets multiple very bad ones posted every day, with so little detail that they're often impossible to answer uniquely. I believe a few other sites have banned identification questions altogether. SFF is one of the few Stack Exchange sites which gets generally good quality ID questions and thrives on them as part of a healthy combination of topics.
Why is this? As a reasonably active user on both SFF and M&TV, I've often pondered this question, and I think the answer is more to do with medium than genre. When reading a book, you usually need to exercise your imagination more: you can't see what the characters look like, so you have to give them faces and voices inside your head, and that makes the details more likely to stick there. Plus a book tends to be more of a long-term commitment: you can be done with a film in a few hours, or even just glimpse parts of it in a shop or on a plane or on the TV while you're doing something else, but to read a book you need to sit down and give it your full attention for a longer period, which again makes it more likely to stick in your head better. I think that on average, people are more likely to retain the details of a book they've read than a film they've seen.
Anecdotally, I've also discovered on SFF that book ID questions tend to be higher quality than film ID questions. This vague gut feeling is backed up by quantitative evidence. According to this Data.SE query, the average score of ID questions tagged with [movies] on SFF is 5.49 while the average score of those tagged with [short-stories] is 8.55. This isn't too great a statistic, since many story ID questions on SFF don't have any medium tag, but it's still quite a striking difference.
In summary, I think identification questions should be a very useful category for our site. Let's not ban them, at least not right away. Let's give it a couple of months and see what kind of questions we get. If we discover after a while that the questions we're getting tend to be low-quality, we can decide to impose stricter regulations on them, or even ban them altogether. But let's not ban what could be one of our strongest selling points without even giving them a try first!
IMHO, we should just start with them as Off-Topic. They're generally low quality, low effort, and get closed more often than answered on Movies. They also just don't help future users of the site.
In the interests of having all viewpoints represented here...
One of the biggest arguments made in favor of story-id questions is that they are "practical" questions, meaning that they are solutions to real world problems faced by the asker. I would say that this argument reveals a fundamental disconnect about the purpose of this site, as well as what literature should be about. To put it mildly, whether a question is "practical" is a terrible way to evaluate questions on a site about literature. The purpose of literature, and art in general, isn't "practical" in nature. If the only argument in favor of story-id questions is that they are practical, then they have no place on this site.
Let's try a different yardstick for measuring whether a question is a good question: does the question increase one's understanding or appreciation of literature? Obviously, this is in many ways a subjective judgement. But I would argue that no matter what way you look at it, story-id questions do not increase anyone's understanding or appreciation of literature.
Here's the structure of a typical story-id question:
Question: I can't remember the following story. Here are some relevant details: a, b, and c.
Answer: You are thinking of [story x].
What do we learn about literature from reading that question? That [story x] exists, and that it contains a, b, and c. That's it! Any other question on the site, you would learn something about literature: an explanation for a plot point, an explanation of the author's intent in a particular passage, etc. But with story-id questions, you can't learn anything.
Which is why I feel so strongly that all story-id questions should be closed as off-topic. They don't help this site become a resource to learn more about literature, because there is nothing to learn from story-id questions.
is:a and the story-ID tag; I do this all the time on SFF when hunting for dupes.
The work well in SciFi story-identification with more them 7,000 posts. I think we should allow them here as well.
