Can "does this exist" questions be reworded to be on-topic without asking for the first instance?

Question

My understanding (based on this meta question) is that most list questions are off-topic unless the list is finite and narrow in scope.

It seems that questions asking if something exists tend to be categorized as list questions and therefore off-topic because they invite people to cite competing examples, generating a long list of possibilities with no way to determine the "correct" one.

I know asking for the first instance of a work is a surefire way to reword the question to be on-topic but it also tends to take the focus away from how closely the answer meets the question and places the focus on finding the earliest instance that maybe sorta kinda fits.

Is there a way to reword a "does this exist" question to be on-topic without asking for its first appearance? Perhaps by restricting the scope down to a smaller number of works therefore limiting the number of possible examples so it fits what the linked meta question describes?

Answer 1

No, not really.

Those sorts of questions could be closed as Too Broad, List, or Recommendation. Since two of those are in the same close reason, that tends to get picked.

The problem with them is that it is hard to say why any answer would be more right than any other answer. If I said "Yes" with one example, is that the most right answer? What if someone else found two examples? On the other hand, how do I prove a "No", I have not read every superhero story in existence, and there are many things that exist that google can't find.

So the issue here is that its a poor question for our format, and as a result it gets closed. Technically speaking, it should be closed as:

off-topic because...
This question does not appear to be about science fiction or fantasy within the scope defined in the help center.

But

Requests for lists of works or recommendations are off-topic as they do not fit our questions and answers format. Feel free to ask about people's favorites in chat.

Is close enough we don't worry about it.

Answer 2

I suggest we risk to allow questions asking for recommendations if they are specific enough.

It would liven up the site, which lately started to resemble a poor substitute of Wikipedia, or in the case of the Tolkien questions, the Tolkien Gateway.

To provide one example here is a simple question about LoTR:

What were the “Black Pits” the orcs referred to?

the answer to this can be found in less than five seconds by a basic google search containing the keywords 'Black Pits' and 'Tolkien'. The first hit is the Tolkien Gateway:

The Black Pits were dungeons of torment under Barad-dûr. They were known to Shagrat who cursed "The Black Pits take that filthy rebel Gorbag!" after the two orc companies had had a disastrous fight in the Tower of Cirith Ungol.

The Tolkien Gateway entry also contains the references. We have maaaany similar questions in our bigger tags. To be clear, I am not proposing to get rid of these, as they seem to be very popular, and we have some quality answers to these simple questions, answers which are coherent, written by people who have an in-depth knowledge of the subject and who provide sources and additional details. There are even people who manage to write an interesting answer to questions like 'What is the name of a building where owls are kept?' (Owlery) Those answers are top-notch and very helpful to the OP, help to popularise an already popular theme, but if I want to expand the subject a bit, to ask if someone had written a parody on the life in Barad-dûr or compare fantasy books portraying Moria-style cave systems or ask for novels in which some characters speak in the black speech or in a specific elven dialect or in a new language created by the author, I am not allowed. Those questions would be closed faster than saying 'Mubull'.

Sometimes it feels SFF doesn't allow to introduce less popular authors than Tolkien or Rowling or creators like George Lucas. If I am looking for recommendations on the portrayal of a specific cyberpunk trope or a description of a space elevator in hard sci-fi books and would like some advice from people who read similar ones, then again, if I post a question, it will be very short-lived, which is a pity, as SFF could be an excellent tool for introducing less known authors and tropes.

So why the restrictive policy? In the cases mentioned OP has a specific problem and would like answers from people who have expertise on the subject.

To prevent the SFF being flooded by low-quality questions about overused and cliche tropes we could define what we consider too broad. While a question "I am looking for a book about aliens" would be indeed too broad, one asking "I am looking for a hard sci-fi novel about a spaceship crashing on a planet inhabited by intelligent ammonia-based alien life" while still would have many possible answers, hopefully will attract people who are interested in the subject and had read books on it, people capable of writing informative answers introducing the top quality books on the subject with their assessment. Answers like those would be very helpful to those interested in them, and in general good for the stack, and to prevent endless repetition of popular tropes, new questions on already existing themes could be closed as duplicates.

Answer 3

As has already been pointed out, an answer of "no" is unprovable and cannot be supported by reliable sources. The only possible answer is "yes" (or no answer at all). If the question has an answer, we already know what that answer is, and if it doesn't have an answer, then we don't want it on our site because it's unanswerable.

Presumably, you don't just want the "yes." You also want an example. That changes your question from "Does [X] exist?" into "Can you show me an example of [X]?"

But that's too broad. There are probably loads of examples, and we can't very well list every one. Without any additional qualifications, every such example is an equally valid answer to the question. That makes it a list question, and thus off-topic as overly broad, as amflare has explained.