Librarians actually make a great study into the art of coaxing people into making their questions more specific, which is called the reference interview. Here's an actual interaction I had in my wild pre-archives days:

Patron: Where are the Japanese books? 
Me: Asian literature is shelved in a different library on campus I can give you directions blah blah blah
Patron: Oh I thought you had manga here. 

Of course yes I was working at the campus library with all the graphic novels. This was me doing a bad job. I didn't do any reference interview, and I almost made them haul to another library only to be majorly disappointed by the Asian literature on offer. Lesson learned by me, figure out what the people want before you give it to them.

So the real reason, to me, for asking more questions for somewhat hazy questions like "How did mid-evils poop" is getting at the heart of what makes people ask their question. What information are they looking for? What level of information are they looking for? Not everyone phrases their follow up questions that well though, so you often do get an exchange that is like "This is too broad."/"Okay, 14th century France, whatever, I don't really care." This is obviously not very useful.

So I often try to ask "What makes you ask the question?" Often you'll get more insight, maybe they were reading Game of Thrones and wondered about if something in particular was realistic or invented, that sort of thing. There's usually a pretty specific question hiding behind an open one, and if the poster and questioner can both come to an agreement on what it is, everyone is happy. Theoretically. :)

Whenever I give such a response, it's usually to make sure I can provide the answer people are looking for.

If you ask "How did Native Americans do X before the Spanish came?" you're talking about thousands of years of history on two continents, which is not narrowed by the question. Often the OP can specify what they were thinking about when they asked the question but seemed implicit as a layman. Some people mean only US/Canada area when the say "Native Americans." But if they use it with the Spanish, maybe they were thinking of a people the Spanish actually encountered. Some people want to compare North Americans to Mexicans, while others will have wanted to include Mexico in a North to South America comparison. If we can clarify this, my research is easier and the customer is more satisfied.

The general rule of thumb is to put as much information into your question as you can. No one will be mad if you say "France and England around 9000 AD" instead of "Middle Ages."

I find that the "refine your question" question makes it harder for me to answer, not easier. Yes, the answer to "what was x like in the Middle Ages" is most likely a monograph or twelve in length. But then the person usually refines it by choosing some random time period and place that is equally unhelpful because I then can't answer at all (England in the 16th century, it usually seems like, which isn't even really medieval [My personal recent favorite was 17th century Britannia. I still can't figure out whether this was serious of passive aggressive sarcasm]).

I prefer to take an overly broad question and say, "well, that is overly broad. But here is what I know about X place at X time. Maybe other people can chime in about other places and times." And then answer within the constraints that I give.

The overly broad question is a particular problem for the Middle Ages, I think, because of the lay understanding of the Middle Ages as a thousand years of monolithic stagnation. But I also think we can be overly pedantic about this. If somebody is asking about "Medieval Europe" and not specifying location or time, they most likely mean the stereotypical ren-faire version of the Middle Ages. Which means they're most likely thinking England, France, and Germany between 1100 and 1500, even if they don't know that. I prefer giving them an answer that accounts for the central Middle Ages in Western Europe while pointing out that the answer has temporal and geographic bounds, and that outside of those bounds things looked different. This is because I feel like my purpose here is to be helpful while also teaching people things they didn't know. Bitchily insisting that they needed to specify whether they wanted 9th century France or 14th century Poland, and then giving no answer, is not helpful or informative.

The reason why we ask to refine is that the stereotypes regarding the Middle Ages, if they existed at all, occurred during incredibly narrow instances in geography and time (basically parts of England, parts of france, maybe in the 13th-14th century). This is actually pretty similar to the debate on feudalism, and its no coincidence that the two are linked.

If you haven't noticed, the reason for this clarification is actually very similar to the ongoing other debate on "throughout history" questions. A broad time frame tends to cause people to resort to simple recollections of stereotypes. A narrow time frame allows the specialists to come and build on a base of knowledge they've spent a considerable time working on.

Even though "theoretically" asking for a wide range "should also" produce quality answers, our years of experience as moderators of this sub has determined that this is not the case. I would equate it to people's early 1990s predictions of the Internet as a utopian community of knowledge seekers.

Instead it's... well you know how it really is...

First let's just assume that we aren't talking about the people who post vaguely out of laziness. Yes I understand this is a pretty fundamental assumption, and I'll easily admit that they probably constitute a secure majority of "bad questions." But the answer to them is obvious enough and uncontroversial. A majority however, by its own definition, is not every case. Laziness, in other words, cannot account for every vague question posted on AskHistorians. Something is leftover.

Ok so to build on the OP's point, I would like to offer the that if a poster hasn't refined their question, it would be because they lack the knowledge to do so. Which is of course the point of asking in the first place.

So why is there such an insistence on specificity from those who can't deliver on it? Too often, I've seen OPs pressured into pulling 900 AD out of a hat. That seems rather harmful. What about the 1000 AD guy?

Ok so we have a date to start with, but does that date really mean anything to the OP? Well as far the experts are concerned - of course. "That's all the difference in the world." Hence specify the question.

Isn't this sort of the point however? As an expert, you've devoted your efforts to History so that you can extract meaning out of otherwise arbitrary facts and figures. Perhaps you've gotten so good at it, that you now see two distinct pictures when someone says 900 AD vs 1000 AD - but of course, not everyone can.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to me why we ask newcomers to submit to facts and figures when they aren't getting anything out of it, and we can just as easily cut past those details into what are almost certainly their core concerns.

When a poster says "The Middle Ages" what else are they thinking of other than the traditional image of lords and ladies? Yes admittedly, there is some guesswork involved, but I'd like to offer two points. First, the OP can always clarify in a response. And second, absolutely no one starts out by thinking about 900 AD.

They start with Game of Thrones.

I feel as though others have addressed the problem of ambiguity in these kinds of questions, but there is another factor that makes questions like 'what was X like in the middle ages?" problematic; that historians don't always agree on periodization. How do you define the 'middle ages'? Is it a geographical term? If so, is it limited to Europe, and even then, to some particular part of Europe? Are you defining it temporally? If so, how do you decide when the 'middle ages' begin and end? There are other factors as well: do the middle ages end when one particular social group experiences a change in their perception, when a particular kind of institution becomes more important or another less important?

As you can see, just posing these questions opens up the problems of historical periods and the kinds of questions that you can ask about them. These kinds of questions are never clear cut and are what makes the periodization of history problematic. We have to divide history into periods out of necessity, but by doing so open ourselves up to huge generalizations.

When one person says 'the middle ages', they likely mean France, England or Germany sometime in the High-Late Medieval era, however to another person it might also include Russia, Iberia, Greece & the Balkans or even the Near East, and involve nearly a millenium of history! This is why asking questions about something as broad as 'the middle ages' is so problematic; it is an incredibly broad subject, both temporally and geographically, so that a questioner who asks about 'warfare in the middle ages' will probably be disappointed if I were to talk about 8th century Irish warfare when they really wanted to know about High-Medieval feudal knights.

As well, historians themselves might have different opinions on what constitutes 'the middle ages' that will equally disappoint if they have to answer such a broad question. For example, the French historian Jaques Le Goff defined the middle ages as having lasted from the 3d century AD to the 18-19th century. If I were to follow in Le Goff's footsteps and answer a question about 'the middle ages' in the context of the late Roman Empire or France under Louis XIV, people might get upset and send me angry messages saying "that's not the middle ages!". But then the burden of proof is on my imaginary critics; what is the 'middle ages'? How do you define it? When you answer those questions, you will be able to formulate a more appropriate question for our experts here.

Now, all of this is to say that questions about an incredibly broad period of time like 'the middle ages' are never going to be satisfying for the questioners or the answerers. It's just better for everyone if people who want to know about knightly combat in France ask that specific question instead of asking about 'warfare in the middle ages'.

I'm an avid reader of /r/AskHistorians and I think that one of the nice features of this sub is that you do have to be specific. If you go into /r/bikes and say "What's a good bike to get?" you're going to be asked for more information or just ignored (never been to /r/bikes, just using it as an example).

There's a clear difference between having experts at your fingertips ask you to refine your question so that they can better answer you and just being a condescending dick. I don't think I've seen any occurrences of the later.

The best thing I thing the qualified can do to help the pleebs out here is just come back with the refinement/guidance questions to help OP. If OP is actually interested enough to know the answer, they'll come back and add more criteria to their post.

The other responses answer your question pretty well, but there is one thing I've missed:

If you ask a reasonably specific question and provide some context, the person answering it can always decide to make it more broad if that's necesary or relevant.

For instance, one of my first answers here was to the question "Were Roman wars (Latin war, Samnite wars etc.) justified by a need for security?" That's a great specific question. The accompanying text specifies the time period (500-300 BC) and explains how OP came to the question.

All that allowed me to answer the question, without even mentioning the Latin/Samnite wars, in such a way that OP still replied with "I could not have hoped for a better response.". Thanks to all the context provided by OP it was clear to me that he wasn't really interested in the Latin/Samnite wars; he was interested in how historians have viewed the Roman wars of expansion.

Now if he had just asked "How have historians viewed wars in the Ancient World", he would not have gotten that response. I'm not going to spend the time writing and sourcing a 700-word reply if I'm not reasonably sure OP is actually interested in what I'm writing. If with "Ancient World" OP actually means Ancient Egypt, or Classical Greece, or the Hellenistic world, or Persians, or Germanic tribes, then all my effort would be wasted.

I recently posted a question in which at least 70% of the responses were "your question is overbroad/inaccurate/unclear, refine it and ask again." At the very least, before someone posts a "refine your question" response, he should scan the extant responses for a similar one. It is tremendously frustrating to have to fend off each "refine/extend" request in the question.

I do this, although I had to go searching back 11 pages in my profile's 'never-ending-Reddit' to find the last time I did so. I also don't think I'm wrong in doing so as I will usually provide constructive criticism.

The chief reason I am loathe to respond in general 'Middle Ages' or 'this is my specialty' terms is because it is difficult and dangerous. It either requires a knowledge of 1000 years of history, or it risks tipping into 'throughout history' anecdotes without substance. I've also been burned too often by, 'Oh, but I don't care about [my example]' to want to put in the effort I usually dedicate to a post. There have been a couple of exceptions, such as this one for /u/Vladith, but then I reasonably suspected that Vladith wouldn't respond in such a manner or take this as representative of the Middle Ages as a whole. This last point is a real danger should the mode of answering you propose be instituted and somewhat antithetical to the entire purpose of the 'sub.

I don't expect everyone to pick up a history book and study for [x] hours before devising an insightful question worthy of a place on the Oxbridge finals. I do want to answer questions for people who have demonstrated a genuine, rather than passing, interest in the topic. To me, being able to specify a period and location is an indication of this.

This was a question with great potential ('How different were personal and social relationships in medieval times?') but one constrained by its scope and prior knowledge of medieval history and sources.

I think my response below will be of use not only to you but to anyone wondering about why sometimes we are pedantic about asking for a loose period and location and how to ask 'better' questions.

Right, I've been keeping an eye on this one for a while and I'm rather glad no one has attempted to answer it.

This is an interesting question but far, far too broad. Firstly, there is the matter of period (c.500-1500) and geography (you don't actually define Europe, although that's the place most commonly associated with 'medieval'): when/where. While the relationships themselves might not have been substantially different the ability of historians to determine this may well have. For example, there are vast swathes of history where the chief form of evidence is archaeological with some smatterings of contemporary (albeit probably copied in later manuscripts) annals or chronicles. This is true of much of Western Europe up to the Carolingian period, and Eastern and Central Europe up to approaching 1300. Archaeological evidence is, by its nature, circumstantial. We cannot create narratives or extrapolate easily for scenarios we do not have readily available evidence for. So if our chief source of evidence is burials, for example, it is rather more difficult to ascertain what day-to-day life might have been like or how social or political bonds were formed. Likewise, although it is somewhat more usable, annal and chronicle records do not usually deal with the more mundane aspects of life. So we might learn about how one lord expressed his amicable relations with another lord but we're much less likely to have surviving records of how townspeople or villages dealt with one another.

Northern Europe, such as Scandinavia, becomes a much more accessible topic in terms of sources due to the sagas as repositories of social and political networks, although somewhat abstracted, as they deal so heavily with feuds.

All of this evidence is, however, weighted by social standing. The most powerful and influential were considered worth keeping track of and as a result many of the lower classes are lost between the cracks of historical providence. This is an important idea to bear in mind when formulating your future questions (who).

As we approach the Central (or High) Middle Ages (c.950-c.1320) there is a gradual shift from oral to documentary record keeping, which in England are an especially rich resource for uncovering the conflicts and agreements of non-elite, and more exhaustive legal codes reveal the expectations of jurists and lawyers regarding socio-political networks.

Another key development is the great survival of vernacular literary traditions, which can range in content but were still largely the preserve of the social elite. The gap is, however, broadening and we can begin to uncover much more information about the 'middling' class between the aristocracy and the non-martial but 'free' persons who might not yet claim to be aristocrats. Slaves, serfs, and peasants, remain a somewhat muted voice in vernacular traditions into the thirteenth-century but as we move into the fourteenth-century things begin to change. Where voices do emerge they tend to be in rather exceptional circumstances, such as the Inquisitional records of southern France.

In fact, it begins to change rather dramatically. The Black Death created a vastly different economic and social outlook to the thirteenth-century, for the laboratores at least. This has been frequently described as the 'golden age' of the peasant worker. Movement became much easier, wages generally rose (even for women, who could now demand a near parity with male harvesters). Greater literacy and flourishing vernacular traditions gave birth to some of the finest resources for understanding interpersonal relationships (such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, The Book of Margery Kempe, Piers Plowman, Gawain and the Greene Knight, to name a few insular examples from across the socio-political divide). This is in addition to the excellent legal records. Moving swiftly into the fifteenth-century the picture is generally much clearer across the board. All of the innovations of the previous few centuries have remained in tact, there is a greater diversity and number of surviving sources and the picture can be much more accurately established.

It is not unlikely that a historian of any period with some reasonable knowledge of the core sources will be able to reconstruct some of the socio-political interpersonal relationships you are asking about (especially in the negative - who was fighting who and how - as this kind of stuff leaves a mark on a wider community than friendship does, at least in terms of surviving record).

So that should help with when/where/who, although note that I am largely discussing England. As this is an Anglophone community there are more specialists concerned with, or at least able to find specialist literature concerned with, England in the Middle Ages. Others with more specialised knowledge of Hungary, Poland, or Scandinavia might disagree with my comments based on their more specialised knowledge of their particular sources.

We move onto the final point, which is slightly more difficult for me to gauge and express in a way that doesn't seem, well, condescending.

This is why. Why are you interested in personal/social relationships? I don't think any historian will be able to quantify how many friends a person might have had (we don't have Facebook lists, flawed though those are); nor have you particularly expressed what you mean by 'how close could they be'. You're next question is answerable, but not many people are actually going to go into it, because you leave it so open-ended. 'What would happen' - what does this mean?

You are asking a question, you are expecting some form of answer. People will be more inclined to answer if they think you're actually interested in the topic rather than it has popped into your head and will likely be gone within the week; and you will get a more detailed response attuned to your interests if you put the effort into going through the when/where/who/why process before posting. This does not mean you have to say, 'I want to know how a Yorkshire miller in 1125 would deal with one of his best friends sleeping with his wife' (this is too specific), but if you could narrow it down to a certain social class, a certain geographical region, and explain a particular facet of socio-political bonds, then you will likely receive an answer providing someone has the specialism and time to draft one. This might mean having a look through the list of flairs and PMing someone with relevant expertise, or it might mean picking up an overview book (or using Wikipedia) to narrow your question.

Polling questions are frowned upon, questions beginning with "In your area of expertise…." Responding in the way you suggest would turn the question into one of those.