Not everyone always agrees on what trivia is. Partially for that reason, the moderators of /r/askhistorians have changed the wording of the rule against "trivia-seeking questions."
We've often struggled with the wording of this rule (it used to be called "throughout history"), but while the name of the rule has changed, the meaning of it hasn't.
Because we have a limited number of moderators and a limited slate of moderation tools, we have to forbid questions that generate large numbers of low-quality answers. Without such a prohibition, we'd spend an extraordinary amount of time on a handful of questions, and the rest of the subreddit would suffer.
So please, keep your questions as narrowly focused as possible. If your question can be summarized as "tell me random stuff about X" or "tell me about X in several centuries around the world," you're better off asking it in /r/history.
"What's the earliest X" questions-- yay or nay?
I have an idea, not sure how feasible it is. What if, instead of removing such threads, you use AutoModerator to lock the thread so that only flaired users can make top-level comments?
Since I'm more interested in using history to learn about stuff, I've always found myself tempted to ask questions that skirt pretty close to this boundary.
For instance, would it be removed if I were to ask a question about, say, wars that dragged on for more than a decade? If I asked if there tended to be commonalities between them, or simply what tended to cause wars to find no decisive end? I could specifically ask about the second Punic war, or the last Byzantine-Sassanian war, or the Mongol conquest of the Song, but I'm really only interested in the specific war for what it tells me about the bigger picture.
Perhaps questions of this type could be added to a list of potential topics for Trivia Tuesday?
So GET MORE MODS. Jesus christ, why do mods whine about doing too much work, yet refuse to share their precious powerz with more people? It's not rocket science - get a bigger team of mods if you want to be so precious about ''low quality'' answers. Why can't you let the voting system do its work? We really don't need you people to personally OK every single question and comment.