This is a follow-up to @Caleb's Is "Historical Trivia" off-topic?
The consensus there was that those questions are fine, since it's about video games. This conflicts directly with the older
How do we feel towards specific questions about the history of a certain game mechanic?
And the Request for Tag Burnination: [Game-History], which is status-completed
I assume the newer META overrules the older posts, and Historical Trivia is on-topic on Arqade. If you disagree, feel free to discuss this in Caleb's META post linked above.
The problem I wish to address here is the inconsistency between the on-topic page of the help pages and the off-topic flagging reason descriptions.
On-Topic section of Help doesn't explicitly mention historical trivia as off topic. Furthermore,
If your question generally covers things such as [...] Game mechanics and terminology
it is on topic. And historical trivia pertaining to game mechanics and terminology (i.e. almost all of them) "generally covers" those two points. Which means that Help correctly lists them as on topic.
On the other hand, the text for flagging a question as off topic because it's game identification reads in part:
Questions asking for help identifying a game [...] based on [...] any other set of criteria (i.e. "What was the first game to…") are off-topic [...]
Which explicitly states that a large portion of historical trivia questions are off-topic, even though the help page doesn't say so.
The problem here is obvious disparity between the sources, which can (and does in my case, see below) lead to confusion, discussion and other things. The remedy for this, and this posts request is simple:
Update the flagging reasons to not explicitly disallow trivia-type identification questions
Some background as to why this post was made
I just flagged multiple questions with that format as off-topic, after finding the old META post and before seeing Caleb's new META post. I was confused that the help section didn't list them as off-topic at first, but several questions of that type were closed for that very reason, so close-votes it was. And after clicking "off-topic", I was actually confirmed in my assumptions.
Actually, I then commented on the brand-new question "Which MMO first came up with dungeons" that it's off-topic, resulting in the user deleting the question shortly afterwards, and I'm very sorry to the OP for that and I'd like to prevent such things to happen in the future.
Questions about the history of games, their terms, or conventions, and how they have developed over time.
. This tag seems unnessesary and is pretty much identical to the (now dead) game-history tag. – Caleb Aug 13 '14 at 9:14