Hello everyone and welcome to the sixth installment of our continuing series of Rules Roundtables! This project is an effort to demystify what the rules of the subreddit are, to explain the reasoning behind why each rule came into being, provide examples and explanation why a rule will be applicable in one case and not in another. Finally, this project is here to get your feedback, so that we can hear from the community what rules are working, what ones aren't, and what ones are unclear.
Today's topic is addressing the rule concerning "No Poll-Type Questions". So first, the rule.
"Poll"-type questions aren't appropriate here: "Who was the most influential person in history?" or "Who was the worst general in your period?" or "Who are your Top 10 favourite people in history?" If your question includes the words "most" or "least", or "best" or "worst" (or can be reworded to include these words), it's probably a "poll"-type question. These questions do not lend themselves to answers with a firm foundation in sources and research, and the resulting threads usually turn into monsters with enormous speculation and little focussed discussion - and, as such, are banned here.
While it might seem to be pretty straightforward, I'm here to break it down, and provide some explanation as to why this rule exists, and why it is an important one!
##What's wrong with those type of questions?
Questions about "best," "worst," "favorite," "most," "least" and the like can be great pedagogical questions, because they get to issues of historical methodology. A question such as:
Who was the most influential person in history?
can be really useful in the classroom, because it forces us to ask a lot of questions: what is influence? how is it measured? does the nature of influence change over time? can a person from the past be more influential than modern leaders with access to nuclear weapons? is influence about military power, or the power of ideas, or the power to inspire? etc ...
But the major drawbacks of asking that type of question on this type of forum are made apparent by the above paragraph:
the question by itself raises more questions;
the answer to the question is largely dependent on how you frame it, as in how you answer those other questions;
because of 1 and 2 above, there's unlikely to ever be a definitive, well-sourced historical answer to that kind of question.
Because the goal of AskHistorians is, after all, to answer questions about the past, we find that allowing questions to stand that aren't answerable runs counter to that policy. Answers to questions like this are inherently opinion-based, not facts-based, and this isn't the right place for them.
On a more practical level, threads that are poll-type question threads really quickly devolve into half-baked, half-remembered answers with little to no focused discussion. And they're nightmares to moderate, and while our mod team is legion, we are all volunteers who are not unlimited in our time we have to spend on the sub.
##But I really want to know why historians think some people, events, or time periods are more important than others!
Something to keep in mind about this is that we all study what we find interesting; I'm a naval historian because boats and ships fascinate me. Other people on our sub study gender, or politics, or military histories; or the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance; or areas or regions; or some mashup of the above. A lot of times that's just because it's what we think is cool, or what we became interested in through our coursework or an inspiring professor or a book we read when we were 10, and so we're leery of ranking our field in comparison to others.
But, that said, in our fields we are generally comfortable discussing what things are more influential than other things, or that are studied more than other things, and we do allow questions that ask about methodology, such as:
Lincoln is generally rated as the best president. Why do historians think this, and what criteria are they basing their arguments on?
What skills did Horatio Nelson possess that lead us to characterize him as a brilliant admiral?
Why is St. Augustine considered the most influential early Christian theologian?
Why are the Councils of Nicaea considered foundational in early church history?
and so on. The basic idea is that asking how historians have ranked things will produce more insight into how history works than simply polling a group of people online.
##Where can I ask a poll-type question, then?
There's always our Friday Free-for-All thread, where (almost) anything goes and which is generally lightly moderated. You might also consider posting questions of that nature on our less strictly moderated sister sub, r/history.
One of the forms of question that I find I struggle with quite a bit is "What is the earliest X". I understand that this isn't a poll-type question per se, as it may very well have a correct answer, a tentatively correct answer, or at least a well-constructed proposed answer, I feel like they are nonethless quite often somewhere between poll-like and trivia-seeking, as there is simply no way that I can conceivably know if I have the correct answer or not. So looking over the past year of such questions, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=earliest&sort=top&restrict_sr=on&t=year
I can talk about early Arabic biographies of commoners. I can talk about early works of Arabic literature that are regarded as being bad. I can talk about early games in Arabic culture, but I often don't bother A: because I can typically assume that a classicist will throw out something earlier, and B: if both an Arabist and a Classicist were to answer the question about early things in our respective fields it would basically be a throughout history question, even if it wasn't precisely phrased that way.
Though I agree that opinion-based questions are in general bad. But I have seen some mods wrongly relied on this part of the rule:
If your question includes the words "most" or "least", or "best" or "worst" (or can be reworded to include these words), it's probably a "poll"-type question.
Obviously there can be questions using "most"/"least"/"best" that are not opinion-based.
At the risk of being banned, I would like to say that Nelson was a terrible admirable because he only won two major battles and died during the second one.