Request to reopen/reevaluate my Final Fantasy Question

Question

Yesterday I asked a question: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/q/50407/11582

It was closed within two hours for being not constructive.

I would argue that people who feel that this question fits

"This question is not a good fit to our Q&A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion."

do not understand the nature of the question. It is a well known fact that each of the FF games have reoccurring names, famous monsters, and such throughout them that make the game part of the same series in spite of the fact that each of them take place with a totally unique story, world, etc. This fact is documented throughout Wikipedia and the FF wiki.

The reason why I asked this question is much of that information is incomplete and I was hoping for a FF enthusiast to be able to shed some light on the subject.

This question: A) Has a finite answer, while it is a list, it is a definitive list their is only a few things outside of some monsters that reoccur (Cid, Holy, Wedge, etc.) Therefor it is totally answerable. B)It is constructive, in my searching I could not find this information codified in one place C) It has a standard, if it doesn't reoccur, it doesn't belong. D) It is interesting, in my limited research before asking this question I found out things I didn't even know such as that Gilgamesh reappears in more games then any other character in FF series.

I do appreciate that this would be a large undertaking, but it one that I have wished for for years, and I would happily place a bounty on it for its answer.

Answer 1

While it's certain that there's a wide array of information that would be useful and interesting to the internet at large, the StackExchange format doesn't suit itself well to storing all of these types of information. When we encounter something that doesn't fit the format, we respond by closing the question.

This doesn't mean the question is invalid, or that the information is uninteresting, or that it's fundamentally unanswerable, just that it doesn't fit well here. We don't always have the perfect close reason either. Sometimes more than one applies, and sometimes the prohibited list doesn't really map one-to-one to the available close reasons, etc.

The problem with questions like this is that the answers are unbounded. There are multiple websites on the internet dedicated to chronicling Final Fantasy lore, and the vast volume of frequently updated information is just too large to be a good fit for the StackExchange format.

Citing a few relevant places in the FAQ:

You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page.

Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.

This is a very open-ended question that books could be written about. For instance, many of the monsters are shared among the various Final Fantasy games. We can't really expect to maintain a table of each monster and which Final Fantasy games it appears in. Just that list alone would be pages of information that would require updating each time a new Final Fantasy game is released. Add in magic, summons, characters, plot elements, etc, and the "correct" answer to this question is far too long, complex, and subject to frequent change to meet the requirements of the site.

You could try to get around this by saying "it must reoccur n times" or "only notable entries should be listed," but then you introduce subjective criteria that are debatable, which is also not a good format for this site.

This could also be considered a type of "Catalog" question from the prohibited list:

Catalogues (listing games that fit specific criteria or are like an existing game)

In this case, you're asking for a listing of specific criteria that are similar across a group of games, which is kind of this type of question turned inside out. These types of question tend to invite debate about the criteria, and are also near impossible to generate a "complete" answer to.

For instance, if the question had been "What games contain Odin as a character?" - that would also have been closed.

I hope that this longer-form explanation of the close reason clears up some of the issues you may have had with the question's closure.