Hello everyone!

Today, we are making a marginally notable change to the rules governing submissions. The rule known as the "Throughout History Rule" is being replaced with the "Trivia Seeking Rule". The changes to the rule from the existing wording are the following:

Our guiding principle is that if a thread can be summarized as "tell me random stuff about X through history" "tell me random stuff about X" then it falls into this category of trivia seeking rather than looking for in-depth answers, which is this community’s main focus. Questions likely to be removed are those asking about all history and all places at once. Questions likely to be removed are those which are not bounded by a reasonably defined time and/or place, which do not ask a specific question but rather seek random facts, or otherwise lack clarity that would allow for a comprehensive answer to address the question in its entirety. 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 down the scope of what you are asking.

###What Does This Mean in Practical Terms?

Our intention is to improve clarity of the rules for users, and allow us to better enforce them with more consistency:

• This wording better reflects how the "Throughout History" rule was being applied previously, with questions asking about development over time being permitted, and questions that lacked cohesiveness or asked about disjointed miscellany being removed.

• The new rule more explicitly defines the criteria that the original rule was intended to combat, namely threads that don't call for any sort of comprehensive answer, but rather invite users to contribute piecemeal, and (usually rule-breaking) responses. We have nothing against threads like that, but they are better suited to placed like /r/history, /r/askreddit, or /r/TellMeAFact.

Hopefully the wording should make the intent and enforcement of the rule a little clearer than before.

###What Questions Will or Won't Be Allowed Now?

Questions that might have passed muster previously are ones that, while possibly specific to time and/or place, clearly lack a cohesive element which lends itself to a comprehensive answer. We aren't monsters though, so we realize that, especially in history, there often is more than one answer even to a rather narrowly tailored question. So don't understand "comprehensive answer to address the question in its entirety" to imply we are removing any question for which there could possibly be more than one answer, but rather that questions simply shouldn't be inviting haphazard, partial responses!

While a question such as "What are examples of 19th century science and medicine that has been disproven?" would possibly fall on the wrong side of the rule, a similar question, such as "How reliable was science and medicine in the 19th century?" or "How recognizable would the scientific method of the 19th century look to a modern scientist?", would not. While they are similar in topic, the latter two address the concept of 19th century science, while the former simply asks for examples of it, without larger context, which is the core of what makes it "Trivia Seeking". We have nothing against these questions, but simply ask you take them elsewhere (and maybe come back to ask about specific things after!).

Additionally, as regards "reasonably defined time and/or place", we will continue to grant rather wide latitude as regards "specific" with time and place. So for instance, while 14th Century Aquitaine will yield a wildly different answer than 9th century Sweden, we aren't going to be expecting more than "Middle Ages" for a question about the period (sorry Medievalists). Certainly, we always like to see questions narrowed down as much as possible, but we also realize that the role of this sub is for people who don't know much about a topic to learn, and placing excessive barriers to periodization or localization can be an unfortunate 'Catch-22'.

Questions which might have been removed previously or at least seemed in conflict with the existing rule, but will be allowed, are ones that, despite being broad in scope, nevertheless call for comprehensive responses, such as, "How the European concept of sovereignty has evolved since the Peace of Westphalia?", which covers several hundred years.

###What is the Reason For This Rule?

The "Throughout History" Rule has been around since before I was a mod, and to be honest, I don't recall what I thought of the rule when I joined the team, but I can say with certainty that over the nearly two years of doing this, I absolutely agree with its purpose, having seen plenty of threads which were borderline and allowed into devolve into seas of deleted one or two sentence comments.

A rule limiting questions with regard to their scope isn't because those questions are unanswerable, but rather, the rule is born out of more practical concerns, dictated by the medium we are working in. Can those questions be answered amazingly, with fifty experts weighing in with 50 awesome answers? In theory, yes. But in practice, before the rule was implemented, the experience was the those questions generally just attracted lots of marginal answers - brief, incorrect, trivia, etc. So the driving reason for the rule was, in the end, a practical one, as it was felt that in the end the amount of junk comments that resulted far outweighed the amount of good answers. And while we are now changing it a bit, the underlying purpose of the rule remains the same.