user1908: Krazer's post from July 2014 about identification requests asked the following question:

Do [identification-request questions] attract so-called "help vampires" that plague much of the Stack Exchange network of sites (especially Stack Overflow)?

That is, do identification-request questions attract users to the site that consume the time of answerers, while not contributing back to the site?
It sure looks like they do!
Here are some data about participation of users whose first post (meaning "question or answer", i.e. comments ignored) on the site was...

...an identification-request question: data for "category 1"
...in naruto, bleach, one-piece, or fullmetal-alchemist (these four tags together have about as many questions as identification-request, though significantly fewer users): data for "category 2"
...any question: data for "category 3"

All of these exclude users who created their accounts less than 4 weeks before the latest data dump was imported to SEDE, as well as users who created their accounts during the site's private beta.

Consider the following summary statistics:
╔══════╦════════════════════════╦═════════════════════╦═════════════════════════════╗
║      ║ Asked other questions? ║ Posted any answers? ║ Commented on non-own posts? ║
╠══════╬════════════════════════╬═════════════════════╬═════════════════════════════╣
║ cat1 ║  42 ->  8%             ║  45 ->  8%          ║ 161 -> 30%                  ║
║ cat2 ║  53 -> 39%             ║  33 -> 24%          ║  69 -> 51%                  ║
║ cat3 ║ 184 -> 19%             ║ 153 -> 16%          ║ 367 -> 37%                  ║
╚══════╩════════════════════════╩═════════════════════╩═════════════════════════════╝

It comes as no surprise that category 1 users (people whose first post was an id-request question) contribute less to the site in aggregate than category 2 users (people whose first post was a big-3 or FMA question) or category 3 users (people whose first post was a question of any kind).
Data becomes very sparse as you look for more fine-grained statistics (since we're still a small site), but a glance at the histograms for the various columns in the SEDE queries universally has the right tail being meatier for categories 2 and 3 than for category 1, indicating, again, that category 1 users are (on average) more vampiric.

I will now take a moment to reiterate all the reasons I'm aware of that we should ban identification-request questions:

They do not make the site interesting and bore the site's users.
Voters don't like these questions, as evidence by the low score of identification-request questions relative to questions on other popular tags (sort by "# Ans" to see this more clearly). [On SF&F: same deal.]
Many of these questions go unanswered - they're zombies. [On SF&F: even worse.]
Fully 20% of the questions on this site are now identification-request questions - and this trend is accelerating! (Why is this bad? A superabundance of questions on any one topic makes a site unpalatable to users who don't like that topic. Would you enjoy Stack Overflow if it was brimming with COBOL questions?) [On SF&F: the fraction of identification requests increased for a while but then leveled off.]
32% of identification requests that received an answer within 24 hours have no response from the OP (in the form of a comment or accepted answer). The corresponding figure for the site as a whole is 17%. For the site minus ID requests, it's just 13%. [On SF&F: 27% for ID requests; 14% for the site as a whole]
Lots of identification requests have been showing up in the Hot Network Questions sidebar lately. This is bad, because this makes our site look dumb to users on other sites in the SE network. (Unfortunately, this is anecdotal, because I don't have data about what has being showing up in HNQs lately. I know Logan was keeping track of this stuff at some point in the past - maybe he still is?)
Many identification-request questions are tantamount to "can you read my mind?", or worse, "can you read the mind of my friend, on behalf of whom I'm asking this question for some bizarre and utterly incomprehensible reason?". Christ. Arqade has banned "game-identification" questions that lack an audiovisual artifact. They've been doing this longer than we have. I think they know what they're doing. (Comparisons to Movies.SE would be helpful, but running similar tag-based analyses there is unfortunately intractable because of the absurd amount of meta-tags they have.)
Despite there now being a popup thing that tells you to try reverse image searching, some people just aren't doing that (one, two, three). Yes, some of these will end up only giving you Japanese or Chinese results, which the OP may not be able to read, but quite frankly, if you really care what an image is, I expect you to at least run it through Google Translate and see what that tells you (i.e. I basically subscribe to the Jeff Atwood school of thought: posting on Stack Exchange should be what you do after you've exhausted every other option available to you). What this tells me is that allowing identification requests is attracting lazy people to the site, and we don't want lazy people.
Identification requests generally don't get very many views (despite prurient identification requests yielding large positive outliers, as I point out further below): out of 61 tags with at least 10 questions, identification-request questions are the 7th-least-viewed in aggregate on a per-question basis. (This assumes that a question with V views tagged with A and B adds V to the total view count for both A and B. This is imperfect, but I'm not sure what works better.) Alone, this is no argument (we don't want to get rid of nanoha, after all), but seriously, these questions aren't (and by nature, cannot be) helpful to future viewers. If they were, they'd be viewing them!

Other things that peeve me about identification requests:

We have a steady stream of people posting things that are just vaguely anime-style that we end up having to trace back to some rando's original art on pixiv. Super-useful, right?
Most of our highly-viewed identification requests appeal to a rather prurient interest. 6 of the top 10 strike me as prurient:

https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/9587 - seems prurient
https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/13867 - prurient
https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/6045 - jesus christ guys
What is the name of the anime this pink-haired girl is from? - prurient
Manga/Anime of two female secret/military agents featuring countless upskirt moments - prurient
https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/6191 - oh heavens above




user7579: I feel conflicted about ID requests. At the time Krazer made the referenced post, I was still new to the site and thought it was a little harsh to talk about getting rid of them altogether. But hours of chasing wild geese and trying to squeeze blood from stones for the benefit of hit-and-run questioners who won't even accept an answer afterwards has changed my mind a little.
If I have a definite idea of what series the OP is thinking of, I don't mind answering an ID request, but there are many, many times when the question is impossible to answer, because, as senshin says, it's "tantamount to 'can you read my mind?', or worse, 'can you read the mind of my friend, on behalf of whom I'm asking this question for some bizarre and utterly incomprehensible reason?'". If, like me, you're not very bright, you might go spend time doing the OP's research for them and come up with nothing, because you have no idea what you're actually looking for. When I did my own research to find the incredibly obscure series Chiisana Obake Acchi, Kocchi, Socchi that I'd seen when I was five and only remembered fragments of, I had a pretty good idea when I'd found it, because what I found triggered more memories and fit with my recollections. But I didn't have that when I was searching for a series on someone else's behalf; this essentially made it impossible for me to find the series. Questions whose answers can't be found don't contribute anything.
I'm also pretty fed up with what senshin calls "a steady stream of people posting things that are just vaguely anime-style that we end up having to trace back to some rando's original art on pixiv", or even worse, things like this question. That doll doesn't look even vaguely anime-related to me, and when I asked why the OP thought it did, no response. Answering these questions doesn't require anime knowledge; it requires Google gymnastics and lots of spare time. And the answer is not likely to be worth much to anyone later. 
On the other hand, I think Logan M. makes a lot of good points about why ID requests aren't a problem. I'd add that questions looking for a series, when they're well answered and aren't left dangling (as they so often are), have a somewhat subversive side benefit—they can introduce readers to new series. I've tried a few new series because an ID request looking for it caught my eye. So in that way, I suppose these users are contributing the site, albeit very very indirectly. And certainly, as Logan M. says, "identification questions are generally about pretty obscure stuff, so it only makes sense that the answer rate would be similar to the more obscure stuff which is more representative of our site as a whole", and I'm the last person who would want to limit questions about obscure series on the site just because there's a good chance the questions won't be answered. After all, I am the one who asked questions about Hanayamata, Reset!, Bungaku Shoujo, and Zaregoto, even though I was pretty sure no one on the site would be able to answer them. And on SO, while I don't read COBOL questions, I do rely on the community of Clojure experts who post answers about that relatively obscure language. So in another sense, these users are contributing by broadening the focus of our community beyond just Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece. Still, I have to admit that these hit-and-run questioners who show up, ask one bad question, and disappear, bother me. 
One final note, about the prurient ID requests: this is likely something our community will have to address in the future in a larger way. While not all anime appeals to prurient interests, it does seem that anime deals with sex and romance more often and more pruriently than is typical in the works that SFF.SE and Movies.SE cover. The anime fandom is the fandom that made up terms like "trap", "shimapan", and "lolicon", along with entire specialized vocabularies for describing fictional homosexual relationships designed for the titillation of heterosexual readers of the opposite sex from the characters (yaoi, yuri, uke, seme, etc.). We will likely have to deal with this in a more proactive way than SFF or Movies if we want to keep things fairly clean, and ID requests, since they're so popular with new users, could be ground zero for this issue.

user24: I've noticed a trend among regular Stack Overflow users which, as someone who doesn't use SO, is frankly bizarre. SO users tend to think of SO (and by extension all SE sites) as a battleground between "good questions" and "help vampire questions". They think the people asking for help are lowering the quality of the site, and will ultimately lead to the site being unusable, by good questions not getting the spotlight they deserve.
That may be the case on SO, but there is no battleground here. Questions are not starved for attention. We only get around 10 questions per day, and many of these are seen by the regular users here. Even questions with low view counts still typically get to around 100, and nearly 1/6 of all our questions have passed 1000 views. I have no trouble reading all of them except a few series I don't follow. Of all the sites in the network we could become, SO is number 1 on my list of SE sites I hope we don't become like. This is a recreational site about several media of entertainment. If we take ourselves as seriously as SO, it would simply not be fun, and there's no point to this site if it isn't any fun. The problems they face there, with not enough users to answer all the questions (even the well-written ones) are problems which I would just give up on if they were here, and I'm someone who is rather dedicated to this site. I have a hard time believing we'll ever be much like SO, or that it would be a good thing for us to try to be. So to me, the idea that people who aren't "contributing" and "only" ask one question is very strange: that question is already a contribution!
More to the point though, that's really what we're here for: to help people with questions about anime. That's in fact the only reason we're here. There are no "help vampires". There are people who want answers to questions about anime. Some of them ask questions well, and some poorly, but we ideally want all of them to get their answers here, and in the exceptionally poor cases we'll send it back to the OP saying that the question needs work and hopefully offering constructive criticism. If the user sticks around, that's great, but they are definitely not under any obligation or anything of the sort, and we shouldn't count them as bad if they don't feel like sticking around.
Your analysis shows that users whose first questions are identification-request questions post fewer posts on average than the site. I don't see why that's a problem. We're a question and answer site. There can't be answers without questions. Each question is fundamentally keeping this site just a little bit more alive and active. If a user only feels like asking one question and gets their answer here, that's still a net positive for us. Sure, I'd love it if everyone stuck around, but not everyone particularly wants to. If the only way we can help them is by identifying an anime for them, that's still something.
And ID requests are helping people, whether or not you like it. For one, when we answer them correctly (which is not all that much less often than the site average), we help the OP. In addition, I (and several other regular users) have found them useful for purposes other than the OP's original one, e.g. to discover new series I was not aware of. This is extremely rare outside identification-request, but not uncommon while browsing it. You may say that "this isn't what the question was for", but you can't deny that it's still a helpful source.
It's not unheard of for identification requests to actually get a significant number of hits, presumably by people looking for the same series. Look at Anime with a little red haired character who pilots a racing pod or Where is "See you Space Cowboy" from? for two examples. Yes, this is rarer than for other tags, if by "other tags" we mean mostly things like anime-production and naruto. But if you look at questions on tags with only a few uses (e.g. obscure manga series from decades ago) I think you'd be hard-pressed to claim the situation a whole lot worse there.
The really big sin of identification-request is that they're grouped in a way that makes it easy to think there's something wrong and target specifically. It's a big tag without the following and compiled knowledge-base of a big-name series. If you look at the tag alone, it looks huge. It has more questions than naruto. And it has a lower answer rate than any of naruto, bleach, one-piece, and fullmetal-alchemist. Wow, it must be terrible, right? No, in fact, the identification-request's 87.1% answer rate is almost the same as the site-wide rate of 87.5%. The oddballs here are the mega-popular series which have a combined 98.7% answer rate.  
But identification questions are generally about pretty obscure stuff, so it only makes sense that the answer rate would be similar to the more obscure stuff which is more representative of our site as a whole than those few extraordinary tags. We aren't going to get 20% of our incoming identification requests looking for Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, or FMA no matter what we do, so the less popular series are over-represented in the tag. Relative to our site-wide stats identification requests are pretty much average in terms of answer ratio, but it's hard to identify or target the other "problematic" questions because they're not yet statistically significant or worth the effort. Likewise, the views on most identification requests aren't stellar, but they're only particularly bad when you compare them to other big tags; if you look at the site in full they're not terrible, though admittedly below average (but still above what a question would get on SO). Much the same story holds for the scores in the tag. identification-request looks like a bundle of really bad questions when compared to the likes of naruto, but it's more of a bundle of fairly average questions compared to the site as a whole, and removing it doesn't really help our average stats appreciably.
Moreover, deciding whether or not a topic is a good fit based on this kind of statistical analysis seems profoundly backwards to me. Statistics like traffic are only useful for understanding trends in the absence of any major changes to the site. If we keep the policy and enforcement the same, an improvement in answer rate is a good thing. But it's a good thing because it means we're helping more people. Changing the policy simply because this stat will improve isn't helping more people, it's trying to game the stats. We should be thinking about in what way we can help the most people, and to me, none of the arguments I've heard presented here or anywhere else are convincing that the answer isn't to "allow good questions, both on identification and on other topics".

Now, with all that said, I do agree that there's a limited (but perhaps growing) problem, not with identification requests as a whole, but specifically with unanswerable identification requests, and a seeming inability to separate these from the acceptable ones via voting and/or closing. This is a real problem and in my mind requires some action. Some questions tagged identification-request are just a dump of a couple random disjoint plot points that aren't even memorable, and the OP expects us to read their mind. Even if users here know the series which is being asked about (which we probably do in many cases), we wouldn't be able to answer it. That is a problem, and frankly, our existing criteria don't cut it when it comes to doing this. Quite often a question will get by on a technicality when I actually check these. Other times, a perfectly answerable question (e.g. one containing a complete plot summary of a unique series) nonetheless doesn't technically fit.
I've thought a lot about this over the past month or so and have a fairly concrete proposal for a modification to the guidelines which I think will alleviate a lot of this. I'm intending to post this proposal in the very near future (to spoil it a bit, it's a modification of my earlier proposal at What kind of policy should we adopt for current and future "identification-request" questions with no audiovisual artefacts? from before we had any concrete guidelines, adapted and simplified to make it easy to decide). It also fixes much of the issue of repetitive/non-descriptive titles. I've been testing this for some time now and I found that in about 90% of cases I could immediately determine in seconds if a question was good or if it needed more detail. My intent is to post this suggestion in the next day or two if there are no major delays.

1908: <p><a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1063/is-it-feasible-to-keep-identification-request-questions-going-as-they-are-now">Krazer's post from July 2014 about identification requests</a> asked the following question:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Do [identification-request questions] attract so-called &quot;help vampires&quot; that plague much of the Stack Exchange network of sites (especially Stack Overflow)?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That is, do identification-request questions attract users to the site that consume the time of answerers, while not contributing back to the site?</p>
<h1>It sure looks like they do!</h1>
<p>Here are some data about participation of users whose first post (meaning &quot;question or answer&quot;, i.e. comments ignored) on the site was...</p>
<ul>
<li>...an <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/identification-request" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;identification-request&#39;" rel="tag">identification-request</a> question: <a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/anime/query/261681/vampires1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">data</a> for &quot;category 1&quot;</li>
<li>...in <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/naruto" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;naruto&#39;" rel="tag">naruto</a>, <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bleach" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;bleach&#39;" rel="tag">bleach</a>, <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/one-piece" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;one-piece&#39;" rel="tag">one-piece</a>, or <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fullmetal-alchemist" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;fullmetal-alchemist&#39;" rel="tag">fullmetal-alchemist</a> (these four tags together have about as many questions as identification-request, though significantly fewer users): <a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/anime/query/261705/vampires2" rel="nofollow noreferrer">data</a> for &quot;category 2&quot;</li>
<li>...<em>any</em> question: <a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/anime/query/261735/vampires3" rel="nofollow noreferrer">data</a> for &quot;category 3&quot;</li>
</ul>
<p>All of these exclude users who created their accounts less than 4 weeks before the latest data dump was imported to SEDE, as well as users who created their accounts during the site's private beta.</p>
<hr />
<p>Consider the following summary statistics:</p>

<pre><code>╔══════╦════════════════════════╦═════════════════════╦═════════════════════════════╗
║      ║ Asked other questions? ║ Posted any answers? ║ Commented on non-own posts? ║
╠══════╬════════════════════════╬═════════════════════╬═════════════════════════════╣
║ cat1 ║  42 -&gt;  8%             ║  45 -&gt;  8%          ║ 161 -&gt; 30%                  ║
║ cat2 ║  53 -&gt; 39%             ║  33 -&gt; 24%          ║  69 -&gt; 51%                  ║
║ cat3 ║ 184 -&gt; 19%             ║ 153 -&gt; 16%          ║ 367 -&gt; 37%                  ║
╚══════╩════════════════════════╩═════════════════════╩═════════════════════════════╝
</code></pre>
<p>It comes as no surprise that category 1 users (people whose first post was an id-request question) contribute less to the site in aggregate than category 2 users (people whose first post was a big-3 or FMA question) or category 3 users (people whose first post was a question of any kind).</p>
<p>Data becomes very sparse as you look for more fine-grained statistics (since we're still a small site), but a glance at the histograms for the various columns in the SEDE queries universally has the right tail being meatier for categories 2 and 3 than for category 1, indicating, again, that category 1 users are (on average) more vampiric.</p>
<hr />
<p>I will now take a moment to reiterate all the reasons I'm aware of that we should ban identification-request questions:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://movies.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/32/identify-this-movie-questions/75#75">They do not make the site interesting and bore the site's users.</a></li>
<li>Voters don't like these questions, as evidence by <a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/anime/query/160176/average-score-for-questions-and-answers-by-tag" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the low score of identification-request questions relative to questions on other popular tags</a> (sort by &quot;# Ans&quot; to see this more clearly). [<a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/scifi/query/160176/average-score-for-questions-and-answers-by-tag" rel="nofollow noreferrer">On SF&amp;F</a>: same deal.]</li>
<li>Many of these questions go unanswered - <a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/anime/query/172449/tagged-zombie-timeseries?Weeks=52&amp;TopTags=15#graph" rel="nofollow noreferrer">they're zombies</a>. [<a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/scifi/query/172449/tagged-zombie-timeseries#graph" rel="nofollow noreferrer">On SF&amp;F</a>: even worse.]</li>
<li><a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/anime/query/261651/the-identification-requests-are-taking-over-cumulative?TagName=identification-request#graph" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Fully 20% of the questions on this site are now identification-request questions</a> - and <a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/anime/query/261652/the-identification-requests-are-taking-over-averaged-instantaneous?TagName=identification-request#graph" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this trend is <em>accelerating</em></a>! (Why is this bad? A superabundance of questions on any one topic makes a site unpalatable to users who don't like that topic. Would you enjoy Stack Overflow if it was brimming with COBOL questions?) [On SF&amp;F: <a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/scifi/query/261652/the-identification-requests-are-taking-over-averaged-instantaneous?TagName=story-identification#graph" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the fraction of identification requests increased for a while but then leveled off</a>.]</li>
<li><a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/anime/query/261772/the-vampire-flies-away?Param=1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">32% of identification requests</a> that received an answer within 24 hours have no response from the OP (in the form of a comment or accepted answer). <a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/anime/query/261772/the-vampire-flies-away?Param=2" rel="nofollow noreferrer">The corresponding figure for the site as a whole is 17%</a>. <a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/anime/query/261772?Param=3" rel="nofollow noreferrer">For the site minus ID requests, it's just 13%</a>. [On SF&amp;F: <a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/scifi/query/261787?Param=1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">27% for ID requests</a>; <a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/scifi/query/261787?Param=1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">14% for the site as a whole</a>]</li>
<li>Lots of identification requests have been showing up in the Hot Network Questions sidebar lately. This is bad, because this makes our site look dumb to users on other sites in the SE network. (Unfortunately, this is anecdotal, because I don't have data about what has being showing up in HNQs lately. I know Logan was keeping track of this stuff at some point in the past - maybe he still is?)</li>
<li>Many identification-request questions are tantamount to &quot;can you read my mind?&quot;, or <em>worse</em>, &quot;can you read the mind of my friend, on behalf of whom I'm asking this question for some bizarre and utterly incomprehensible reason?&quot;. Christ. Arqade has banned &quot;game-identification&quot; questions that lack an audiovisual artifact. They've been doing this longer than we have. I think they know what they're doing. (Comparisons to Movies.SE would be helpful, but running similar tag-based analyses there is unfortunately intractable because of the absurd amount of meta-tags they have.)</li>
<li><a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1084/1908">Despite there now being a popup thing that tells you to try reverse image searching</a>, some people just aren't doing that (<a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/q/17161/1908">one</a>, <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/q/17085/1908">two</a>, <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/17010/which-anime-is-this-child-wearing-headphones-from">three</a>). Yes, some of these will end up only giving you Japanese or Chinese results, which the OP may not be able to read, but quite frankly, if you really care what an image is, I expect you to at least run it through Google Translate and see what that tells you (i.e. I basically subscribe to the Jeff Atwood school of thought: posting on Stack Exchange should be what you do after you've exhausted every other option available to you). What this tells me is that allowing identification requests is attracting lazy people to the site, and we don't want lazy people.</li>
<li>Identification requests generally don't get very many views (despite prurient identification requests yielding large positive outliers, as I point out further below): <a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/anime/query/261783" rel="nofollow noreferrer">out of 61 tags with at least 10 questions</a>, identification-request questions are the 7th-least-viewed in aggregate on a per-question basis. (This assumes that a question with V views tagged with A and B adds V to the total view count for both A and B. This is imperfect, but I'm not sure what works better.) Alone, this is no argument (we don't want to get rid of <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nanoha" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;nanoha&#39;" rel="tag">nanoha</a>, after all), but seriously, these questions aren't (and by nature, cannot be) helpful to future viewers. If they were, they'd be viewing them!</li>
</ul>
<p>Other things that peeve me about identification requests:</p>
<ul>
<li>We have a steady stream of people posting things that are just vaguely anime-style that we end up having to trace back to some rando's original art on pixiv. Super-useful, right?</li>
<li>Most of <a href="http://data.stackexchange.com/anime/query/261782/highly-viewed-id-requests" rel="nofollow noreferrer">our highly-viewed identification requests</a> appeal to a rather prurient interest. 6 of the top 10 strike me as prurient:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/9587">https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/9587</a> - seems prurient</li>
<li><a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/13867">https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/13867</a> - prurient</li>
<li><a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/6045">https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/6045</a> - jesus christ guys</li>
<li><a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/9927/">What is the name of the anime this pink-haired girl is from?</a> - prurient</li>
<li><a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/16783">Manga/Anime of two female secret/military agents featuring countless upskirt moments</a> - prurient</li>
<li><a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/6191">https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/6191</a> - oh heavens above</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
 7579: <p>I feel conflicted about ID requests. At the time Krazer made the referenced post, I was still new to the site and thought it was a little harsh to talk about getting rid of them altogether. But hours of chasing wild geese and trying to squeeze blood from stones for the benefit of hit-and-run questioners who won't even accept an answer afterwards has changed my mind a little.</p>

<p>If I have a definite idea of what series the OP is thinking of, I don't mind answering an ID request, but there are many, many times when the question is impossible to answer, because, as senshin says, it's "tantamount to 'can you read my mind?', or worse, 'can you read the mind of my friend, on behalf of whom I'm asking this question for some bizarre and utterly incomprehensible reason?'". If, like me, you're not very bright, you might go spend time doing the OP's research for them and come up with nothing, because you have no idea what you're actually looking for. When I did my own research to find the incredibly obscure series Chiisana Obake Acchi, Kocchi, Socchi that I'd seen when I was five and only remembered fragments of, I had a pretty good idea when I'd found it, because what I found triggered more memories and fit with my recollections. But I didn't have that when I was searching for a series on someone else's behalf; this essentially made it impossible for me to find the series. Questions whose answers can't be found don't contribute anything.</p>

<p>I'm also pretty fed up with what senshin calls "a steady stream of people posting things that are just vaguely anime-style that we end up having to trace back to some rando's original art on pixiv", or even worse, things like <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/14513/what-anime-is-this-blue-haired-toy-character-wearing-a-big-yellow-watch-from">this question</a>. That doll doesn't look even vaguely anime-related to me, and when I asked why the OP thought it did, no response. Answering these questions doesn't require anime knowledge; it requires Google gymnastics and lots of spare time. And the answer is not likely to be worth much to anyone later. </p>

<p>On the other hand, I think Logan M. makes a lot of good points about why ID requests aren't a problem. I'd add that questions looking for a series, when they're well answered and aren't left dangling (as they so often are), have a somewhat subversive side benefit&mdash;they can introduce readers to new series. I've tried a few new series because an ID request looking for it caught my eye. So in that way, I suppose these users are contributing the site, albeit very very indirectly. And certainly, as Logan M. says, "identification questions are generally about pretty obscure stuff, so it only makes sense that the answer rate would be similar to the more obscure stuff which is more representative of our site as a whole", and I'm the last person who would want to limit questions about obscure series on the site just because there's a good chance the questions won't be answered. After all, I am the one who asked questions about Hanayamata, Reset!, Bungaku Shoujo, and Zaregoto, even though I was pretty sure no one on the site would be able to answer them. And on SO, while I don't read COBOL questions, I do rely on the community of Clojure experts who post answers about that relatively obscure language. So in another sense, these users are contributing by broadening the focus of our community beyond just Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece. Still, I have to admit that these hit-and-run questioners who show up, ask one bad question, and disappear, bother me. </p>

<p>One final note, about the prurient ID requests: this is likely something our community will have to address in the future in a larger way. While not all anime appeals to prurient interests, it does seem that anime deals with sex and romance more often and more pruriently than is typical in the works that SFF.SE and Movies.SE cover. The anime fandom <em>is</em> the fandom that made up terms like "trap", "shimapan", and "lolicon", along with entire specialized vocabularies for describing fictional homosexual relationships designed for the titillation of heterosexual readers of the opposite sex from the characters (yaoi, yuri, uke, seme, etc.). We will likely have to deal with this in a more proactive way than SFF or Movies if we want to keep things fairly clean, and ID requests, since they're so popular with new users, could be ground zero for this issue.</p>
 24: <p>I've noticed a trend among regular Stack Overflow users which, as someone who doesn't use SO, is frankly bizarre. SO users tend to think of SO (and by extension all SE sites) as a battleground between "good questions" and "help vampire questions". They think the people asking for help are lowering the quality of the site, and will ultimately lead to the site being unusable, by good questions not getting the spotlight they deserve.</p>

<p>That may be the case on SO, but there is no battleground here. Questions are not starved for attention. We only get around 10 questions per day, and many of these are seen by the regular users here. Even questions with low view counts still typically get to around 100, and nearly 1/6 of all our questions have passed 1000 views. I have no trouble reading all of them except a few series I don't follow. Of all the sites in the network we could become, SO is number 1 on my list of SE sites I hope we <em>don't</em> become like. This is a <em>recreational</em> site about several media of <em>entertainment</em>. If we take ourselves as seriously as SO, it would simply not be fun, and there's no point to this site if it isn't any fun. The problems they face there, with not enough users to answer all the questions (even the well-written ones) are problems which I would just give up on if they were here, and I'm someone who is rather dedicated to this site. I have a hard time believing we'll ever be much like SO, or that it would be a good thing for us to try to be. So to me, the idea that people who aren't "contributing" and "only" ask one question is very strange: that question is already a contribution!</p>

<p>More to the point though, that's really what we're here for: to help people with questions about anime. That's in fact the <strong>only</strong> reason we're here. There are no "help vampires". There are people who want answers to questions about anime. Some of them ask questions well, and some poorly, but we ideally want all of them to get their answers here, and in the exceptionally poor cases we'll send it back to the OP saying that the question needs work and hopefully offering constructive criticism. If the user sticks around, that's great, but they are definitely not under any obligation or anything of the sort, and we shouldn't count them as bad if they don't feel like sticking around.</p>

<p>Your analysis shows that users whose first questions are <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/identification-request" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;identification-request&#39;" rel="tag">identification-request</a> questions post fewer posts on average than the site. I don't see why that's a problem. We're a question and answer site. There can't be answers without questions. Each question is fundamentally keeping this site just a little bit more alive and active. If a user only feels like asking one question and gets their answer here, that's still a net positive for us. Sure, I'd love it if everyone stuck around, but not everyone particularly wants to. If the only way we can help them is by identifying an anime for them, that's still something.</p>

<p>And ID requests are helping people, whether or not you like it. For one, when we answer them correctly (which is not all that much less often than the site average), we help the OP. In addition, I (and several other regular users) have found them useful for purposes other than the OP's original one, e.g. to discover new series I was not aware of. This is extremely rare outside <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/identification-request" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;identification-request&#39;" rel="tag">identification-request</a>, but not uncommon while browsing it. You may say that "this isn't what the question was for", but you can't deny that it's still a helpful source.</p>

<p>It's not unheard of for identification requests to actually get a significant number of hits, presumably by people looking for the same series. Look at <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/809/anime-with-a-little-red-haired-character-who-pilots-a-racing-pod">Anime with a little red haired character who pilots a racing pod</a> or <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/7876/where-is-see-you-space-cowboy-from">Where is &quot;See you Space Cowboy&quot; from?</a> for two examples. Yes, this is rarer than for other tags, if by "other tags" we mean mostly things like <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/anime-production" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;anime-production&#39;" rel="tag">anime-production</a> and <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/naruto" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;naruto&#39;" rel="tag">naruto</a>. But if you look at questions on tags with only a few uses (e.g. obscure manga series from decades ago) I think you'd be hard-pressed to claim the situation a whole lot worse there.</p>

<p>The really big sin of <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/identification-request" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;identification-request&#39;" rel="tag">identification-request</a> is that they're grouped in a way that makes it easy to think there's something wrong and target specifically. It's a big tag without the following and compiled knowledge-base of a big-name series. If you look at the tag alone, it looks huge. It has more questions than <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/naruto" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;naruto&#39;" rel="tag">naruto</a>. And it has a lower answer rate than any of <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/naruto" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;naruto&#39;" rel="tag">naruto</a>, <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bleach" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;bleach&#39;" rel="tag">bleach</a>, <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/one-piece" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;one-piece&#39;" rel="tag">one-piece</a>, and <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/fullmetal-alchemist" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;fullmetal-alchemist&#39;" rel="tag">fullmetal-alchemist</a>. Wow, it must be terrible, right? No, in fact, the <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/identification-request" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;identification-request&#39;" rel="tag">identification-request</a>'s 87.1% answer rate is almost the same as the site-wide rate of 87.5%. The oddballs here are the mega-popular series which have a combined 98.7% answer rate.  </p>

<p>But identification questions are generally about pretty obscure stuff, so it only makes sense that the answer rate would be similar to the more obscure stuff which is more representative of our site as a whole than those few extraordinary tags. We aren't going to get 20% of our incoming identification requests looking for Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, or FMA no matter what we do, so the less popular series are over-represented in the tag. Relative to our site-wide stats identification requests are pretty much average in terms of answer ratio, but it's hard to identify or target the other "problematic" questions because they're not yet statistically significant or worth the effort. Likewise, the views on most identification requests aren't stellar, but they're only particularly bad when you compare them to other big tags; if you look at the site in full they're not terrible, though admittedly below average (but still above what a question would get on SO). Much the same story holds for the scores in the tag. <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/identification-request" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;identification-request&#39;" rel="tag">identification-request</a> looks like a bundle of really bad questions when compared to the likes of <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/naruto" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;naruto&#39;" rel="tag">naruto</a>, but it's more of a bundle of fairly average questions compared to the site as a whole, and removing it doesn't really help our average stats appreciably.</p>

<p>Moreover, deciding whether or not a topic is a good fit based on this kind of statistical analysis seems profoundly backwards to me. Statistics like traffic are only useful for understanding trends in the absence of any major changes to the site. If we keep the policy and enforcement the same, an improvement in answer rate is a good thing. But it's a good thing because it means we're helping more people. Changing the policy simply because this stat will improve isn't helping more people, it's trying to game the stats. We should be thinking about in what way we can help the most people, and to me, none of the arguments I've heard presented here or anywhere else are convincing that the answer isn't to "allow good questions, both on identification and on other topics".</p>

<hr>

<p>Now, with all that said, I do agree that there's a limited (but perhaps growing) problem, not with identification requests as a whole, but specifically with <em>unanswerable</em> identification requests, and a seeming inability to separate these from the acceptable ones via voting and/or closing. This is a real problem and in my mind requires some action. Some questions tagged <a href="https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/identification-request" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;identification-request&#39;" rel="tag">identification-request</a> are just a dump of a couple random disjoint plot points that aren't even memorable, and the OP expects us to read their mind. Even if users here know the series which is being asked about (which we probably do in many cases), we wouldn't be able to answer it. That <em>is</em> a problem, and frankly, our <a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/891/what-criteria-should-we-use-for-qcing-for-all-identification-request-questions">existing criteria</a> don't cut it when it comes to doing this. Quite often a question will get by on a technicality when I actually check these. Other times, a perfectly answerable question (e.g. one containing a complete plot summary of a unique series) nonetheless doesn't technically fit.</p>

<p>I've thought a lot about this over the past month or so and have a fairly concrete proposal for a modification to the guidelines which I think will alleviate a lot of this. I'm intending to post this proposal in the very near future (to spoil it a bit, it's a modification of my earlier proposal at <a href="https://anime.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/783/what-kind-of-policy-should-we-adopt-for-current-and-future-identification-reque/792#792">What kind of policy should we adopt for current and future &quot;identification-request&quot; questions with no audiovisual artefacts?</a> from before we had any concrete guidelines, adapted and simplified to make it easy to decide). It also fixes much of the issue of repetitive/non-descriptive titles. I've been testing this for some time now and I found that in about 90% of cases I could immediately determine in seconds if a question was good or if it needed more detail. My intent is to post this suggestion in the next day or two if there are no major delays.</p>
