I watched Agora. I want to learn something about Hypatia. Wikipedia says; "Historia Ecclesiastica is one of the few source about Hypatia". I searched internet and found this; https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6smVijz2aFdNXdNRER1UzhaRFE/edit But i am curious where can i find original papers? Which museum has it? Do you know this? And is this first press?

https://imgur.com/gallery/083NM

Hello everyone and welcome to the 20th installment of our continuing series of Rules Roundtables! This project is an effort to demystify the subreddit and also to gather your feedback to help improve it! We aren't just covering the hard and fast rules though, but also looking at other aspects of the subreddit and the community. This week, we're looking at the (in)famous "[removed]" 'comment graveyards' that are common in the subreddit and why that is the case.

##Eternal September

As any long time reader knows, and any new arrival on the subreddit quickly finds out, many comments in /r/AskHistorians end up getting removed. In any decently sized internet community Eternal September is an enduring issue as new users continue to arrive, and /r/AskHistorians is no different. It has long been the policy of the modteam that any comment which don't comply with the rules and expectations of the subreddit get removed, which in many threads can result in the seas of [removed] comments. Most users expect this, and for many it is perhaps even the hallmark of the subreddit, but nevertheless, we often find ourselves fielding questions about why the rules are enforced in the way that they are.

##Curation of a Space for Quality Contributions

The core reason behind the removal of any and all posts which break subreddit rules is that our aim is to create a space in which people who can best answer your historical questions want to participate. As such, the philosophy of this subreddit might be boiled down to "No answer is better than a bad answer". The expectation of our users - both flairs and lay-readership - is that the answers in the subreddit will be a certain level of quality, so part of creating that kind of space is removing content which doesn't belong. Those just simply aren't what /r/AskHistorians exists to provide a space for. The rules, which we have spent much of the previous installments of this series exploring, all exist for important reasons, so there is no compelling reason to not remove comments which break them.

It also goes beyond simply 'removing what doesn't belong' though. It is an inherent limitation of the reddit platform that posting early is often a key factor in an even marginally decent post quickly establishing itself as the top response in a thread. The flip side is that the kind of in-depth, comprehensive responses which are the hallmark of this subreddit are not something that can be written in the same timeframe as a three-sentence, off-the-cuff, wild-guess. If a thread gets popular, when one "answer" goes up within ten minutes, and the other goes up in ten hours, the first one up will long since have gotten the attention, while the latter comment may languish.

Yes, when it comes down to it we're talking about meaningless internet points, but it is still important to respondents. Everyone here volunteers their time because they love history, and love sharing their knowledge, and knowing that other people read and enjoyed an answer is what makes putting the time and effort into writing and research worth it. We have polled our flaired users in the past, and chatted with many of them countless times over, and time and time again, it is impressed upon us that it is because they know that they don't need to compete with slap-dash comments and wade through unneeded clutter that they keep coming to /r/AskHistorians and keep contributing.

And to be sure, this isn't idle speculation either. While we are 'removal happy' as anyone, we still have threads where an answer which is quickly written but just barely manages to meet the threshold to remain sits atop a thread, hundreds of upvotes and dozens of follow up responses while one which is much more in-depth, but posted hours later, sits all but ignored with a few upvotes. I'm sure many a flair has a tale of woe along those lines. So obviously, we can't entirely eliminate the problem, as we can't keep removing everything in the hope that a better answer materializes to replace it, but we can do our best to minimize such an effect.

Now, objections to this approach usually fall into a few broad categories, which I will address in turn:

####"Let the Upvotes Decide"

To some, moderation should be the minimum required amount. Presumably, in the case of /r/AskHistorians, the rules would more be guidelines, and it would be up to the body of redditors to decide on whether responses meet them, and to upvote or downvote accordingly. Now, putting aside the above matters of cultivation, there is a much more straightforward reason we reject such an approach. Namely that the upvotes often don't do a very good job! Certainly, we often see rules-breaking comments get mercilessly downvoted in just the short time that they are visible before removal - I've seen dozens of downvotes happen in the span of a minute or two - but we've also seen clear rules-breaking posts quickly rise up in a thread before being reported and dealt with by a mod. Simply put, sometimes it works, but sometimes it really doesn't. For people who do want such an approach, we recommend /r/AskHistory or /r/History, but in /r/AskHistorians, as discussed above, our aim is to reward knowledge and effort, rather than mere speed and wit.

####"Just Mark or Highlight the 'Good' Stuff"

A suggestion we sometimes hear, sort of an attempt to split the difference, is to not remove very much stuff, but to sticky or otherwise highlight the response(s) that stand out the best. The actual merits of this approach aside (much of which are addressed in this previous Round Table on "Answered"/"Unanswered" flair), it is unfeasible from a technical standpoint. Reddit's built in comment-sticky feature is limited to mods' posts only, and any system which we could implement would be a CSS hack. It would require manual editing of the CSS for every answer so noted, and the essentially impossible workload aside, it wouldn't work for users of Mobile Apps, or anyone with sub-CSS disabled.

####"But Isn't Something Better Than Nothing?"

Not here it isn't. This subreddit is built on the idea that questions should be answered in-depth and comprehensively, and while we know that not every question can get answered, we don't believe that relaxing the rules in a way to facilitate such a goal would serve the interests of the subreddit. As we often say in the removal reasons, there are many other places people can go to get their questions answered, both on and off reddit, but when they come here we assume that they are here for an informed response from someone capable of engaging with the sources, and providing follow up information. If they wanted someone to summarize Wikipedia "because there are no other answers here", well, they likely know Wikipedia exists and they could have gone there themselves. If they wanted to just read whatever the top hit on Google was, well, its 2016 and my 89 year old grandmother uses her iPad with aplomb, so it is safe to say most people are capable of a simple web-search themselves.

So simply put we'd rather no answer than a poor one, and we remove comments which break the rules, even if that leaves a thread barren.

###You've Sold Me, But Why Not Have a "Non-Answer Chat Goes Here" Automod Post?

This is a recurring solution that gets suggested, an Automod post which would go up in every thread and says something like "If you don't have a complete answer, respond only to this thread". Several subreddits, most prominently /r/PhotoshopBattles, do something of this sort. While it does have some things to recommend it, we nevertheless are not particularly inclined to adopt such a solution, for several reasons.

Most importantly, allowing non-answer speculation or discussion to go on, even in a specific, limited space, would not be conducive to the environment that we seek to cultivate in /r/AskHistorians. The analogy might be imperfect, but it is similar to why, in your school lectures, the back row isn't designated as the "Sit here to crack jokes and chit-chat" row. We don't want to see people making clever one-liners in our subreddit, we don't want to see long strings of uninformed speculation. Simple as that. It isn't the space we are striving for. While providing a quarantined space for those might alleviate those concerns to a degree, in the best case scenario it would be a distraction in the thread, and also reduce the general tenor of discourse in the subreddit.

Regardless of what this space would look like, it has serious drawbacks. If the space is one where users can simply post their jokes and anything else barely related to the topic, any 'insightful discussion' that users might hope it would allow for will be drowned out in short order. If the space is moderated, but with a "lighter touch", then such an approach is asking the moderation team to add a considerable burden to our workload. Keep in mind that people already post jokes and non-contributive responses as it is, and they will certainly do so in considerably more volume if such a space is provided, no matter how clear its purpose is made, so it doesn't solve in any way the "seas of deleted comments" we are so famous for.

##Summing It Up

So that is the long and the short of it. In a perfect world, everyone would follow all the rules perfectly, and we'd never remove anything, but new users arrive constantly, well-intentioned respondents overestimate the quality of their comment, and yes, some people just willfully ignore the rules. We remove those comments in an effort to curate a space for informed discussion and quality answers, as their presence can be a distraction in the best of cases, and quite often serve to disincentivize or drive off users capable of writing them. Our aim is not to be exclusionary, as we welcome any and all to contribute within the rules regardless of academic status or achievement, but it is to be restrictive, and ensure that this subreddit continues to serve as a place to AskHistorians.