Hello everyone and welcome to the 16th 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 standards for asking questions beyond the core rules, which have by now been covered in several previous installments of this series.

###First Things First

An unofficial motto of /r/AskHistorians would perhaps be that there is no such thing as a stupid question. Or as Carl Sagan much more eloquently stated it:

There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.

With that in mind, we try to be as hands-off as possible, and the rules that are in place constraining questions, such as "Example Seeking" or the "20 Year Rule" are kept as limited as we deem workable. However, questions can sometimes be naive. They can sometimes be ill-phrased. And they can sometimes be very tedious. So what we are going to be addressing today are the types of questions which aren't banned by the rules but nevertheless do at times post issue or bring about complains/concerns from the user base, and explain how the mod team approaches these questions which some might think to consider "dumb".

###Not Dumb Questions

Falsely Premised Questions:

Often times a question will be asked in which the underlying premise of the question is off. As long as it isn't in a manner which violates the rules concerning Soapboxing in questions, we will rarely remove a question simply because it is based on a faulty question. We try to be understanding and accommodating that the very reason someone has come to the subreddit is to learn, and removing the question generally won't help the user who asked it, but rather would punish the user for their lack of knowledge. Our decided preference and hope is that their misunderstanding can be corrected by users or flairs of the subreddit, and so those questions are allowed to remain.

It should be noted that with these corrections, the standards of the sub still generally apply! At the very least, we expect corrections and discussion to be conducted with politeness and non-judgmentally, and while we do tend to offer some more wiggle-room when it comes to correctives, such comments should still strive to comport with the rules, and at the very least be comprehensive enough to help the OP understand why they are incorrect, not simply the fact that they are.

"Ancient World", "Medieval World", and other "Scopes":

As exemplified by the "Example Seeking Rule", we try to ensure that questions don't end up too broad in scope. But the flip-side, of course, is the need to balance those constraints with the simple fact that, like with falsely premised questions, laymen coming here to ask questions might not know enough to make their question as specific as some might like to see. While "Middle Ages" can break up into a multitude of sub-periods without even considering geography, to those without an underlying base of knowledge it might just be "Medieval Europe", "the Ancient World", or "Pre-Columbian America". We are of the opinion that while insisting that posters specify whether they mean 13th Century Aquitaine or 10th Century Wessex might make it easier to answer the question, it also will dissuade people from asking them in the first place, so we aim to strike a balance, which in this case means conceding to broad but popular periodizations.

The topic of periodization will be covered in more depth with a later Rules Roundtable, but the important part here is that we won't remove questions which use broad, but common restrictors of scope. We like it when the OP can try to narrow down their question best that they can, but we aren't looking to jack them up simply because they don't know the difference between 9th Century Lombardy and 12th Century Burgundy.

Additionally, we actually will generally remove comments which amount to nothing more than "When/Where in the Middle Ages?" There is often little value in such an interrogation on its own, since a user asking a question with a lack of specificity likely is doing so because they simply don't have a more specific frame of reference. That isn't to say that we frown entirely on such an approach, but we do ask and expect that prospective answerers try to make OP aware in a productive manner, either by seeking to explain the wide variations as part of their answer, or otherwise helping the OP narrow down rather than simply telling them they ought to.

Repeat Questions:

A common complaint is that certain questions get asked repeatedly. There are certainly some which hardly a week goes by without some iteration popping up. We know that for frequent browsers, this it might get tedious seeing "What was Hitler's favorite children's breakfast cereal?" repeatedly, but we have no interest in curtailing questions simply because they are not unique. Even in the case of questions which have spectacular answers featured in the FAQ, History isn't a mathematical equation where only one, single answer says it all. As covered in the previous Roundtable, there can be many different angles of approach, and aspects to emphasize. We certainly encourage users politely linking to previous responses in the FAQ, but we believe that there is never the absolute last word on a question. Additionally, from a more pragmatic perspective, maintaining and updating a list of moratoriumed questions would be a large burden on the modteam.

"Yes"/"No" Questions/Basic Fact Questions:

Our policy here is that OP only gets to set the parameters of their question insofar as it complies with the rules of the sub. Which means questions which are "Yes" or "No" answers, or else asking for a very specific fact - "What was the name of that big tank battle in the Gulf War?" - will nevertheless need to be answered to the standards of the subreddit. It would need to explain a little about Eastings 73, not just the fact that was its name, and a reply which does only the latter would be removed! We generally don't remove the questions themselves though.

"I am a [...]" Questions:

There is probably no topic more divisive on /r/AskHistorians than the infamous "I am a [...]" question. Based on polling we have done, most users have no opinion on them one way or the other, but while there are clearly those who enjoy asking them, there is a vocal minority who would love nothing more than to ban them! The reasons some people prefer to ask them are not really germane to this discussion, although I'm interested in hearing them nevertheless, but two things do need to be said.

1. However much some people dislike them, we have not, nor will in the future, considered banning this phrasing of a question, and will not remove them except in cases where they violate other submission rules, or the use of the first person adds a gratuitously unnecessary level of imagery (You can ask how the medieval legal system handled rape. Please don't ask the question as "a medieval rapist").

2. While we won't ban the phrasing, we do, frankly, advice against it. It is only a minority of flairs who like questions asked in the first person. Most simply ignore the phrasing of it and answer it as if asked in a more conventional manner, while again, a minority will actively avoid answering those questions! As such, using such phrasing can, possibly, drive away someone who otherwise might be the ideal person to answer it but is unlikely to draw in someone who can but would have avoided a more conventional wording. So instead of asking “I am a French peasant in 1789. How does the Revolution affect my daily life over the next decade?”, at least consider simply writing out “How did the French Revolution affect the daily life of peasants?”. In the end if is your choice, but when writing a question you should always be considering your audience!

###Can You Sum This Up Please?

We remove as few questions as we can here, because everyone deserves an answer! What rules we do have are mostly pragmatic and based on the experience of the modteam as being conducive to smooth running of the subreddit. There are sometimes questions which don't break those rules, but nevertheless are 'naive, tedious, ill-phrased, or lack adequate self-criticism'. While those questions can be problematic, we believe that the mission of this sub is better served by allowing them to remain standing in as many cases as possible. So we hope that you all will keep in mind that even a bad question is usually asked with good intentions and ensure that this remains the best place on the internet to come and learn about the past.

I was looking at http://i.imgur.com/sO8qEnK.jpg and it made me wonder if any of those trenches were used during ww2. Surely they would have still been in pretty decent shape.

Map for reference: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4c/Ribbentrop-Molotov.svg/1052px-Ribbentrop-Molotov.svg.png

I was reading [this paper] (http://www.peterleeson.com/Ordeals.pdf) by the economist Peter Leeson in which he argues that trials by ordeals were generally rigged by the clerics who administered them (such as by having someone they suspected was innocent hold iron that was merely warm rather than hot). Leeson suggests that this was to help the clerics determine guilt - if everyone believes that trials by ordeal really do spare the innocent and punish the guilty, those who refuse to undergo the ordeal will generally be guilty while those who submit to the trial will generally be innocent.

This seems plausible, especially as Leeson cites records showing that 60%+ of those who underwent trial by ordeal were 'miraculously' spared. However, it still seems like a grand claim to me, especially as I would expect there to be records of clerics discussing how to rig the ordeals or of nonclerics who suspected what was going on (Leeson does not cite any). Can any medieval historians weigh in on how likely Leeson's claim is?