Sorry no; I disagree. I'd rather a question go unanswered then an unsourced, speculative answer be given and never followed up on. No information over disinformation, every single time.

It's only through speculation do we get to the 'truth' of history. What do y'all think?

No.

:P

I very much do not wish to see this happen.

I personally feel that a thread with no answers is better than a thread replete with bad answers.

And how would we pick which speculation to keep? The first one? The most popular one? All of them?

If you keep all speculation in a thread "as long as" a Good Answer hasn't been posted yet, that's a LOT of effort for moderators.

It is not about getting the "truth" of history, at least for me (I suspect most people's ideals for historiography are similarly unconcerned, and that virtually no one thinks that we find even historical "truth" from speculation).

Ultimately, I come here because it is a high quality subreddit (and good subs mostly don't exist for things that catch my interest). There are other subs for asking questions and speculating. Maybe one can't be historically "right" but one can certainly be Wrong As Hell, and the rules here help people be Wrong elsewhere.

Similar issues have been brought up before. The most recent META thread had quite a few responses from users and mods which address the idea of allowing explicitly speculative posts to stand. I'm copying my response that I gave there to here, as to why allowing speculation posts to remain wouldn't work well given how this subreddit is structured.

Some subset of comments that are currently being deleted will instead be marked by either "cogent speculation" or "personal anecdote"

This actually would require more of a judgment call on the part of the mod team than the current system. Having a binary "pass/fail" system, while it will have its faults and failures, is going to be far less confusing than having a middle grey area. On top of this, it is almost certain that a fair number of posts which are marked as such, instead of contributing to the discussion of the topic, will simply result in META discussion about whether marking the comment as such was justified.

This is best represented by our approach to the anecdotes rule currently. Some of the most painful deletions to make are often personal anecdotes - I still complain about one I had to remove where I guy wrote about growing up in Northern Ireland during the troubles (If you are reading this man, I'M SORRY!). There is absolutely zero chance we would allow all anecdotes and speculation to stand with some sort of tag, and while it would be possible for us to evaluate each anecdote (or speculation) post on its own merits, this creates a myriad of problems.

• It turns what is a simple "Yes/No" call into a judgement call "Does this anecdote meet whatever level we have decided they need to meet?"

• The fact that it is possible an anecdote might stand will cause more people to post, as they think that theirs is worthy of inclusion, turning this into /r/AskReddit, and simply causing more deletions by the increase in overall volume of people posting them.

• And on that note, the ones that are removed, when the poster disagrees with the removal, will lead to arguments about why a given anecdote deserved to stand.

So from a practical standpoint, as you can see, there are a few reasons why we don't want to start bending on the rules about anecdotes or speculation (the latter pretty much has the same pitfalls as anecdotes, from a practical standpoint). And for a more historigraphical discussion of why we are opposed to them, I would direct you here.

comments that are "marked" will always fall below unmarked posts using custom CSS

Putting aside the reasons we wouldn't want to allow these, even with some sort of marking, this also has a lot of problems. Mainly, it would be a massive undertaking in the CSS. /u/brigantus would literally kill which ever one of us suggested implementing this to him (each individual comment would need to be coded into the CSS I believe).

And then, even if we do put it in, many people browse on mobile, or turn of the CSS. These markings wouldn't be visible to them.

So the TL;DR is that it is a messy system to run, and a nearly impossible one to implement.

So that is the sum of it. Allowing speculation to stand would still require only allowing high quality speculation to stand, which is something that is much harder to moderate than simply saying "don't", and giving a possible opening for those types of responses would really just open the floodgates to them, and quite possibly result in even more deletions!

The problem with speculative answers (like the ones I write) is that the very nature of reddit gives a great first mover advantage. As such, people who commit an early response that seems to make sense, despite speculation, may in turn bury an answer that is more thorough, researched, or for that matter, factual.

However, I do think that there is a difference between complete speculation, and acknowledging that there is historical speculation with regards to certain events. For instance, we are not certain as to why exactly the Japanese battleship Mutsu randomly exploded in harbor. While the official conclusion blamed an angry crewman for blowing up the ship, there are also theories of fire (perhaps caused by a smoking crewman or as arson) as well as just pure accident (an unexploded depth charge in the same area may have been set off). I think that so long as a response acknowledges that there is this uncertainty, this should be okay. However, I am not talking about things like "It is unknown whether the Holocaust actually happened."