I just came upon a Wikipedia entry:

Anatolia and the Balkans[edit]

There can be no doubt that human sacrifice survived among a portion of the Türkmen tribes in Anatolia and the Balkans as late as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as contemporary observers testify. John Cantacuzene, who knew the Turks as well as did any other Byzantine author and who had used Turkish soldiers in extensive numbers, remarks that the Turkish soldiers performed human sacrifice over the graves of their slain comrades.[46] While Chalcocondyles reports that Murad II purchased six hundred slaves in the Peloponnese which he then sacrificed to his dead father.[47]

John Cantacuzene understood the purpose of these sacrifices, but was in error when he considered the practice to be of Islamic origin. Among the shamanistic Ural-Altaic peoples it was commonly believed that those whom a warrior slew in this world would serve him in the next. Thus human sacrifice at the grave of the dead warrior was a well-known custom in the religions of the Turco-Mongol peoples and was observed as early as Herodotus, and as late as the nineteenth century.[47]

The references given here lead to Speros Vryonis, Jr. "The Byzantine Legacy and Ottoman Forms." Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Vol. 23/24 (1969/1970), p. 260.

Can we confirm this claim from other sources?

Note that the Wiki also says that the History of John Cantacuzene, which seems to be the primary source of Speros Vryonis, is "an apologia for his own actions, it needs to be read with caution; fortunately it can be supplemented and corrected by the work of a contemporary, Nikephoros Gregoras. It possesses the merit of being well arranged and homogeneous, the incidents being grouped around the chief actor in the person of the author, but the information is defective on matters with which he is not directly concerned."

As a side note, the Ottomans and their Turkmen subjects mentioned above are descended from the Oghuz Turks who adopted Islam much before Murad II. Ibni Fadlan reports his travel through the Oghuz Yabgu State and talks about the funerary rites of the Oghuz Turks (who had not adopted Islam at that time i.e. 10th century). There is no mention of human sacrifice in that account. If there was human sacrifice, Ibni Fadlan would report it as we know that he did report funerary human sacrifice among the Vikings.

Previous

Today:

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.

To start off our program, today's topic will be a discussion of our rules for comment sources. First off, let's consult the rule:

Sources are highly encouraged in all answers given in r/AskHistorians. A good answer will be supported by relevant and reliable sources. Primary sources are good. Secondary sources are also acceptable.

I want to draw attention to the fact that we encourage sources for all answers, but strictly speaking sources are not required. Sometimes users, flairs or even mods will dash off brief comments without bothering about sources. However, a crucial caveat is that sources become required upon request, so people should always be prepared to provide sources, as stated here:

Even though sources are not mandatory, if someone asks you to provide sources in good faith, please provide them willingly and happily. If you are not prepared to substantiate your claims when asked, please think twice before answering in the first place. Please keep in mind that all posters who fail to substantiate their posts when asked in good faith run the risk of having their posts removed.

Most people will not be able to respond to a source request instantly. They may be away from reddit, they may be sleeping. They might need to go to their bookshelf or the library and pull the book to find the exact page. In instances where sources have been requested but have not been provided yet, mods will exercise our discretion with the post. If the post is comprehensive, and the presiding mod knows it to be substantially correct in many points, the post might be left up. Similarly, if a source request is not challenging the main assertions of an answer, but asking for more information/reading recommendations about a minor point of the answer, such an answer will likely be left up.

Conversely, if an answer is making very bold and sweeping assertions and sources are requested, that answer may be removed by a mod. At a mod's discretion, they may choose to make a modcomment noting that said post has been removed, and offering to restore the post when sources have been provided. It is not possible to provide everyone with such notification, given the number of comments that the modteam reviews every day.

What about Anecdotes?

It is also important to point out that you are not a source.

This part of the rule is pretty simple, and plainly stated. In addition to the points raised in that linked META post, which is well worth a read, I also want to mention that “sources” like:

Source: I took a course with Professor Thompkins, and this was in lecture number 5

or

20 years of reading about Caesar

is not acceptable.

In pretty much any academic or quasi-academic discussion of history, sources are used to establish a commonly agreed upon basis for argumentation. Sources allow you to speak from knowledge, so that an argument can have weight to it. At the same time, a person who is familiar with your sources and their arguments can also speak from knowledge. Take for example this exchange. Notice that since /u/shlin28 points out his source as Conant, but also that Conant in turn refers to Richard Bulliets famous study about medieval conversions. Because that was disclosed, /u/Yodatsracist can contribute a perspective about what questions Bulliet leaves unanswered.

When you reference course notes for a class you took, it is very unlikely that a person reading your comments can look up those notes, and speak about those notes themselves.

In the same spirit, anecdotes are not acceptable as the basis for answers in this sub. The reasons for this are substantially the same. Because of the anonymous nature of the internet and Reddit specifically, it is possible for a person claim to have lived through a historical event, but it can be quite difficult to verify such claims. Additionally, anecdotes need to be treated with caution because of the nature of memory. This comment explains it better than I could ever try to

What about Wikipedia?

However, tertiary sources such as Wikipedia are not as good. They are often useful for checking dates and facts, but not as good for interpretation and analysis. Furthermore, Wikipedia articles are open to random vandalism and can contain factual errors; therefore, please double-check anything you cite from Wikipedia. As outlined here, Wikipedia, or any other single tertiary resource, used by itself not a suitable basis for a comment in this subreddit.

Lectures and course notes are considered to be tertiary sources in the same vein as an encyclopedia or Wikipedia article, which are not considered acceptable sources in this subreddit. Incidentally, the mods do notice when an answer provides the exact same list of sources and page citations that the relevant wikipedia page contains, and treat such answers with suspicion.

In other cases, users will simply copy-paste text from a wikipedia article (or other source) and not mention where the words come from. That is plagiarism, and will result in an immediate ban from this sub. So don't do that.

There can be much more said about Wikipedia, but that will have to wait for a separate one of these posts specifically dedicated to discussing wikipedia as a source.

Why don't you just require sources for all comments? That seems simpler/better?

This is an idea that the modteam has discussed more than once, and there are a few different reasons why we feel the current policy is better than simply requiring sources for all comments. Firstly, requiring sources does risk scaring off users who know something and are possible flair material. It shouldn't be a surprise that saying “you must provide a source for everything you say” would become a barrier to entry, and turn people off from saying something at all.

Secondly, not all sources are created equal. Users have and will write up whatever they want to write, and then go and use google or mine through wikipedia footnotes to add “sources” to make their comment look respectable. Requiring sources on all comments won't slow that type of user down.

It says in the rules that only top-level replies really need sources, but follow-up answers will be more loosely moderated

Nope. The rules used to say that there was a distinction between top-level responses and follow-ups. That rule was changed two and a half years ago^1, because we felt that the two-tier system allowed too much room for speculation and bad answers in the longer comment chains. All comments are now held to the same standard or moderation for quality and sourcing.

Why does the rule bother talking about 'good faith' when it says “ if someone asks you to provide sources in good faith”

That specific wording was chosen to tie-in to the rule about civility. There are kind ways of asking about sources, and there are unkind ways of asking for sources, and the kind way is always preferred.

From a style point of view, a source request that looks like

Your conclusion about the influence of Jose Marti's writing in the 20th century emigre community runs counter to what I know of the topic. Can you point me to where you drew your conclusion from?

Is a much more polite way to ask for a source than

got a source?

Also, the mods are well aware that people can have strong feelings about interpretations of history. We ask that source requests be made in “good faith” because we really do not want a source request to become a bludgeon to win a history argument.

If I see an unsourced comment, should I report it or should I ask for sources?

If you can politely ask for sources, please do. You may also report the comment, if you think that it is simply a bad answer.

Of course, if you happen to be Mrs Tenured Professor in Neo-Assyrian Archaeology, and you know exactly what is wrong with that post about Nebuchadnezzar, we prefer for knowledgeable people to rebut bad answers with good ones, rather than simply deleting the post. We will sometimes leave up bad answers that get a very good response, so that it is clear exactly what points the response is referring to.

If anyone has any further questions about the sources rule, please ask and one of the mods would be happy to answer your question.

1. This rule was changed in July of 2013. For some context, 17 out of the 30 current moderators of AskHistorians were not yet mods back then. In July of 2013, I was a freshly-minted flair in the 5th panel of historians. Two and a half years is ages ago in subreddit terms.

Edit- changed footnote format so that it displays in mobile, hopefully.