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Welcome to this week's instalment of /r/AskHistorians' Sunday Digest (formerly the Day of Reflection). Nobody can read all the questions and answers that are posted here, so in this thread we invite you to share anything you'd like to highlight from the last week - an interesting discussion, an informative answer, an insightful question that was overlooked, or anything else.

On /r/AskHistorians, while we police answers closely, we aim to place as few limitations as possible on the questions themselves. Although this does mean that some questions may have a false premise, or be supremely uninteresting to many, we want to put as little as possible in the way of honest inquiry. The two main limitations we have in place are the "No Example Seeking" and "No Poll-Type" Questions rules, which read as follows:

Our guiding principle is that if a thread can be summarized as "tell me random stuff about X" then it falls into this category. Questions likely to be removed are those asking about all history and all places at once or an extraordinary range. If a question isn't reasonably limited to a specific time and/or place, it likely will be removed. If your question includes the phrase "In your area of expertise", "examples of [X] throughout history", or "What are some facts about [X]", strongly reconsider posting it, or else spend some time to narrow the scope of what you are asking. Your question may be a good one, but given the limits of Reddit and our ability to moderate it, we cannot allow this category of questioning because of the stress it adds to the mod-team.

"Poll"-type questions aren't appropriate here: "Who was the most influential person in history?" or "Who was the worst general in your period?" or "Who are your Top 10 favourite people in history?" If your question includes the words "most" or "least", or "best" or "worst" (or can be reworded to include these words), it's probably a "poll"-type question. These questions do not lend themselves to answers with a firm foundation in sources and research, and the resulting threads usually turn into monsters with enormous speculation and little focused discussion - and, as such, are banned here.

Pragmatic Necessity

As noted at the start, we try to have as few barriers to asking a question as feasible. It just doesn't suit the mission of the subreddit, and we don't want to punish people for not even knowing enough to ask a question about something they don't know about! As such, what few rules we do place on the asking of questions are limited mostly to pragmatic necessity, and reflect not a poor question in of itself, but rather a style of question that through long experience we have found to not create an outsize amount of problems for moderation to the standards we expect here.

As we'll go into more detail for each one below, these two types of questions, when they were allowed many moons ago, created a very outsize headache in terms of moderator resources, and as a result their prohibition reflects not the impossibility of answering them, but the likelihood that they will attract bad answers, and the amount of focus they would require from the mod team to keep up to standard. They are both rules which have gone through revisions in the past as well, as we do our best to keep them as narrowly defined as possible to ensure the minimum impact possible from their existence.

No Example Seeking

Example Seeking questions are prohibited because the general result is to create disjointed threads, which don't call for a cohesive response. In many cases, it is obvious what kinds of questions fall afoul of the rule - "What are some things that Kings named Henry did?" - but in other cases it can be borderline. Often a question that is removed under this rule isn't because it can't be expressed cohesively, but because it hasn't been in this case. The best way to avoid a removal under this rule is to consider what the core question you are asking about might be. So while "What are examples of 19th century science and medicine that has been disproven?" would be removed under this rule as it just asks for disjointed examples, "How recognizable would the scientific method of the 19th century look to a modern scientist?" would be approved, as it takes the same underlying concept - the nature of scientific study in the 19th c. - while asking it cohesively.

We realize that in many cases these are questions that can be answered, but that of course is part of the problem. They are questions which might have 10, 20, ... 50 answers. We have enough on our plate moderating questions with one. A classic example from many years back of a thread which wasn't removed quickly enough is a thread about "No longer popular names", which can provide a glimpse of what these kinds of threads routinely would devolve into. As such, we simply don't allow them currently.

Poll-Type

Poll-Type questions can lead to a similarly disjointed thread, but usually for a different reason, since in this case they essentially call for value judgement in a way that isn't well suited to this space. They also come in two tiers, so to speak.

For the first tier, questions like 'Who is your favorite General?', aside from being also Example Seeking, are just opinions, and there is some saying I vaguely recall about how everyone has one. Even expecting some level of comprehensive support behind it, there isn't any good way to moderate a question like that in the manner we expect for /r/AskHistorians.

The second tier also calls for opinion, as while "Worst" or "Most Influential" isn't quite as personal a choice, they nevertheless are answers which can vary greatly from person to person as everyone can frame it differently in their mind, and weigh contributing factors differently. These are even harder to moderate too, of course, since while your favorite if your favorite, answering "Best", or "Worst" comes into contention with any other attempted answer. And while we love to see earnest and friendly academic debate in this space, that isn't the ideal way for it to be framed, especially from a moderation perspective.

As with Example-Seeking questions, the best way to evade this rule is to consider the underlying question you're asking. If you want to ask "Who was the best Soviet commander of WWII?" How is that even a question? consider asking "How did the performance of the main Soviet commanders compare during WWII?" Both questions asks for evaluation, but while the former leads to picking a winner, the latter calls for a discussion which can explore the strengths and weaknesses, and rather than simply giving you a listicle, it gives you the information to weigh and make your own judgments with in the end.

Alternatives

Sometimes, a question just can't be reworked, and sometimes, your question is simply exactly what you intended to ask. We get that, and there are a few alternatives, depending on the precise nature:

• First off, of course, we do make mistakes, so don't feel like you have to inherently accept our decision. A short, polite Modmail stating your case can sometimes result in reinstatement, or at the very least someone on the Modteam may be able to help you reword the question.
• /r/History and /r/AskHistory exist as alternatives to /r/AskHistorians and for the most part, allow questions of this kind, so you can always try there.
• Pretty much any of these questions, and especially the pure opinion ones like "Favorite", are perfectly fine to ask in the weekly 'Friday Free-for-All' thread, so feel free to post there!
• In some cases, especially Example Seeking questions, they may also be suited to the 'Short Answers to Simple Questions' thread which goes up every Wednesday and is stickied most of the week. You can learn of a few examples of what you ask there which can in turn provide the basis for a more narrowly defined question afterwards!

Picture of the cap: https://imgur.com/a/Hw9gVJj

I recently read two articles, one written in 2010, and the other written in 2013, which seem to indicate an immense jump in our knowledge of Shakespeare's life in the years between them. Here is a relevant quote from the first article:

"All we know for certain is that Shaxpere, Shaxberd, or Shakespear, was born in Stratford in 1564, that he was an actor whose name is printed, with the names of his fellow actors, in the collected edition of his plays in 1623. We know that he married Anne Hathaway, and died in 1616, according to legend, on his birthday, St George's Day."

So, this article heavily implies that we know very little about Shakespeare's life, even questioning whether he wrote the many famous plays attributed to him.

The 2013 article, on the other hand, goes into a lot more detail about Shakespeare's financial situation and business affairs than the 2010 article would have had you believe we knew about the guy. So, what did we uncover between 2010 and 2013 that told us so much more about Shakespeare's life?