For the most part we don't have to, because other people will be knowledgable about the topic. It's near impossible to have an answer to a question about a topic that no one knows about.

What's more, most of the "professional" historians here may have the thing they specialise in and would give the best answers to, but they all tend to also have enough more broad knowledge that smelling BS isn't terribly difficult.

an expert in, idk, the history of Kiribati in the 18th century. He makes posts that seem believable to non-experts, even though they're all actually made up with some verifiable facts here and there. When asked for sources, he cites Kiribatian sources, English-language academic sources without previews on Google Books so the mods can't check whether his claims are actually supported by the text, or sources the verifiable claims he puts as a red herring.

So in this particular case, I'd say "hey /u/l33t_sas, take a look at this", and if it were as blatant as your example suggests, he'd know, and if he didn't know, one of the other people we know who know things about Polynesia would know. The thing is many of us are at major universities in faculty or graduate positions, with access to libraries physical and digital, and even if the user in question has access to anything that can be found on Google, the average flair here will probably have access to a lot more.

It's easier to convince the average redditor with a passing interest in history than it is to convince someone who's entrenched in academia and expected to know a lot of junk about stuff that isn't even their focus, and if you're still convincing, there are other people to check with as well.

He makes five posts like these and applies for flair. How do you prevent users like these from gaming the system?

We check flair applications with multiple people. I personally have asked other Asia scholars to check flair apps for people who apply, because I don't know that much about, say, pre-modern Japan. But i know people who do, and I know they know. A lot of the flair applications get reviewed by multiple people before being granted, and even after they're granted, if it turns out to have been fishy, it gets revoked.

That said, don't trust a flair just because they're flaired, and don't distrust a user just because they aren't. There are a lot of really knowledgable people leaving answers here who don't have flair but absolutely know what they're talking about. Flair's super useful, but not the end all be all of quality answers.

Hey!

So, the short answer is that flair verification in this manner is undertaken on a case-by-case basis, but the situation you've described is exceedingly rare - case in point that you've had to choose an incredibly obscure field that happens to be drawing entirely on sources written in an incredibly niche language.

But, nonetheless, to give a little insight on how we assess flair applications; the mod team numbers 37 members, with varying levels of informal and formal education in history and the Historical Method. While 99% of the time, at least one moderator will have sufficient familiarity with the applicant's field to be able to provide the insight we need, we have had situations in the past where that isn't the case - at which point we draw upon the insight of the wider flair community, which introduces the fields of another ~380 specialists to the mix, and is again provides sufficient insight in all but the tiniest fraction of cases. Additionally, and this would be relevant even for our Kiribatan specialist, we use academic peer reviews, tools such as Jstor and Google Scholar to assess the sources being drawn upon, which can provide us with an excellent picture of their quality and how they've been received by the academic community, even when we're not already familiar with those specific sources.

All this isn't to say that our flair verification system is foolproof, certainly - it's not, and on occasion we have had to respond to flairs whose expertise in their field is not as deep as we had originally believed when they applied, although that hasn't happened more than a couple of times in the history of AH. The important take away really is that if you were that determined to game the system, it would take more time and effort to try and fake knowledge in a field to the point where we wouldn't notice than it would to actually educate yourself on that field and apply for a flair which you'd worked to earn.

I hope this clarifies things. If you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to ask! :)

An easy method is to check out their bibliography.

Sometimes a non-flair will post kind of 'meh' answer and will cite suspicious bibliography (few sources, not the sources you would expect, etc.). In order for someone to be flaired, however, we require that they show that they actually know about their field, and that includes being able to critique sources and cite obligatory texts on a given topic.

While it is fairly easy to look up a couple pieces of interesting and legit sounding information, it is much tougher to fake a historiographical critique. Kind of like when you hear someone criticize a novel when they've never actually read it; people end up sounding ridiculous.

In order to fake it they'd need to go to articles by historians who have criticized X or Y authors in the past, see who is regularly cited by texts which discuss a given topic, etc. Then they'd need to compare their source's approaches based on these critiques. At that point it is less 'faking it' than simply them doing research. Usually fakers want easy adulation without the effort of doing real research, so if they have to actually research something (I mean put at least 30 minutes to an hour or more into research alone) they're unlikely to do it.