The only issue I've noticed with them is that many repeated questions will pop up at once inspired by the week's hot topic. Given reddit's mediocre search function, there's not much we can do there besides encourage better reading through the "New" tab before posting.

Otherwise, I agree with /u/Neurorational : refuting bad history is an important function of the sub. Whenever you refute/support a politically loaded question, you will appear to be taking a political stance no matter how hard you attempt to represent the facts accurately. If a Democrat claims Republicans stole candy from 30 million babies, I'll respond that it's an outrageous exaggeration, since reliable history says they only stole from 25 babies with a lot of candy. I could very well appear to be defending the candy-stealing, but I am in fact against it. All I'm doing is providing the facts.

As an appreciative lurker:

The guidelines and approach of this community may enable the most organized and objectively principled thought and discourse that your readers are ever exposed to.

I honestly don't believe that I'm exaggerating when I say that you're doing a humanitarian service when you respond to problematic questions in a guided way.

I do not envy the patience and work necessary for you to provide the responses, but I'm glad that you do.

Thank you.

Do we need to? It seems to me that correcting bad historical claims is an important and useful function for historians, and probably of more practical value of most other questions here.

I found the answers to recent one about the Crusades very informative and interesting.

Mods? This sub has the best mods in reddit. If it gets too out if hand I have faith that they will restore order

I've asked one of those questions, and been a bit shocked at just how much hostility it received. Perhaps a compromise would be to have an agreed upon flair or [Tag] for posts that question the historical veracity of claims made in current events, that way we could still ask our dumb offensive questions, and the super serious historians who cant be bothered with them would have a way to filter them out.

Edit: Just realized OP was one of the only people to actually take the time to answer my previous post. Thanks OP.

While I find the questions themselves often annoying, the replies and moderators' efforts have been superb. I learned a lot from the answers and following discussions, even when the questions themselves may be ****.

However, I must say this class of questions must be a huge mod burden. But as long as it's within what the mods can keep up with, I suppose it's fine.

Another aspect to consider is some contributors may be burnt out or turned off.

A possible policy shift is to redirect those to /r/badhistory, which I personally think isn't a bad policy given the tone of most of these questions.

Maybe in the future we can discuss what to do about "How accurate is [this show, that movie]?"

Maybe this isn't the best attitude but I feel this sub's strengths are its quality and its "tone". So the posts brought up by the OP, and "How accurate is [blah]," do irk me.

I would think that debunking politically loaded bad history is one of the reasons why we're here. If The Bad Guys are going to use bad history as a weapon, I think it's our job to be able to 1) refute them and 2) prove that good history is generally more interesting than the alternative.

Well, i think history is inherently political as a field of study. The real problem are obnoxious posters that hope for clear-cut answers to partisan dilemmas, eschewing in depth research, often from an american perspective. I believe most posters provide an adequately nuanced perspective.

No one in defense of politics and political tought? It seems like a bad word for a lot of people. Also, answering only apolitical questions would not help educate the public and their concerns.

Did you have my comments here in mind? I'll admit that I was a bit too sarcastic in my answers there, but I did comment on how the basic assumptions behind the video are incorrect and suggested a few excellent books that refute this kind of thing. I would love to have a discussion on the underlying assumptions behind the video/picture, but that would I think violate the 20-year rule and force us to talk about modern-day politics. Given the limitations, I only talked about how the video is factually incorrect and answered the OP's question about what the image was. Not exactly a perfect answer, but it did address the most important points about the video - that it is ahistorical and that it was made to drive home a political point.