Coordinated effort to clean up the backlog of pending entries in the DB

At what point does a user just become a moderator? I get that this would be temporary, but I thought the suggestion was for power users to have their own submissions automatically approved to reduce the amount of work for mods. In order to set any of this up though, the developers need to create a new role, users need to be discussed with the team to decide if they should be added, and they still probably need to go through some sort of training to understand the backend process and be reviewed for a while to make sure they aren't messing anything up.

In the meantime, you can already work with mods to try and get things in the queue approved by providing edits and source information to help the decision be made quicker (I've been doing this for some time). However, the further you get into the queue, the more confusing some of these submissions become. It's not right to just approve or deny something without knowing what it is and that the basic details are correct, so it can take a while. Personally, I think the anime queue is in a pretty decent state, considering it was in the thousands back when the Chinese series were mass submitted.

Well, this sounds very untransparent, and it's not like I can just guess where help is needed. There're still submissions which are stalling for months or maybe over a year (I think older ones are gone by this point), and if it's unclear what they are (like if it's some rare festival work for example), then shouldn't mods just DM the person who submitted it to clarify instead of shelving it indefinitely? Same goes for manga. I think the whole process would be faster if there was a presumption that users generally submit things in good faith and generally provide correct information if they care enough to spend time for making a submission (save for those people submitting Castlevania for 200th time)


Entry-wise it may be better than earlier but there're areas where staff DB could be significantly better. I suggested some things earlier but it doesn't seem there's any priority here.
https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=2070449&msgid=68402459

@St0rmblade

What I meant is something like this where I am just posting entries from the queue, submitting updates, and then asking for it to be approved, providing any relevant information. These don't always get looked at (and sometimes I just talk with a mod directly), but it has resulted in a lot of stuff getting out of the queue. I completely agree that mods should reach out to users who submitted entries to ask clarifying details, but I've found that doesn't tend to happen.

While I do agree that most submissions are in good faith, it doesn't mean that there still aren't a lot of submissions for things which may not be in the database, but also don't qualify. You can make the argument that the guidelines should be updated to allow them (I'm typically in favor of adding more content), but in my opinion, I think it's better to not introduce a lot of mistakes by rushing through the queue too quickly. Ideally turnaround on entries would be no more than a couple months, so cleaning up what's currently there and then maintaining what comes in would be great state to be in.

I really like your suggestions on the staff front and agree that the database could see a lot of improvements in that area. In my opinion, I think they should probably just consider adding more moderators who can specialize in specific areas to help with this. Some of these changes require developer updates though, which I am unsure how that all works behind the scenes.

It's also interesting if this is really the case or they just forgot to update the dates in the post:




Last recruitment almost a decade ago? Yeeeeeeah that's questionable...

https://myanimelist.net/forum/?goto=post&topicid=1435506&id=42500981

Even with entries already in the database, my edits of incorrect information take years to get approved.