Recently, there was a thread in which /u/Elm11 made this comment which reads in part:
"More importantly, Hitler / WWII / Tiger Tank / whatever questions are still allowed, and all our normal expectations for quality and comprehensiveness apply. Disallowing questions because we've seen them very frequently isn't a particularly useful approach; it's not a questioner's fault that they're asking something which is clearly popular, particularly here on Reddit."
Part of the issue here seems to be a perception of dilution in terms of the amount of varied, nuanced discussions on this subreddit (that is, other topics being "crowded out" by the sheer amount of questions surrounding Hitler, Germany, and WWII).
As a hypothetical mitigation method, would it be possible to allow for particularly popular topics like Hitler and WWII to be given a metatag that could be filtered or blacklisted by users that have grown tired of these topics?
Falling further down the rabbit hole, is there a potential use for apply subject metatags to questions to facilitate connection between those asking the questions and the experts in those subjects? Is there a potential for faster responses or more-populated discussions by allowing users to filter based upon what they feel is most relevant to their studies? Would this be valuable (i.e. outweight any potential overhead costs) if that were the case? Is it feasible to tag popular topics, or most topics?
I welcome everyone's thoughts and feedbacks. It would be interesting to get another peek at the machinations of moderation on this subreddit. To all the members of the mod team: thank you for all of your hard work!
So to cut to the chase, topic flairs would be really complicated to implement, and are something we have long ago decided not to pursue. The issue is that, unlike science where for the most part you can divide questions into categories like "Chemistry" or "Biology", and thus subs like /r/AskScience can easily implement them, it doesn't work nearly as nicely for us. There are both time periods and geography to factor, and that doesn't even get into topical flairs. Lets take a hypothetical question:
Why did Hitler want to conquer Europe?
What do we tag it as? At the most basic, it could either be Europe or 20th Century (or Modern, or whatever else we assign for the period). And what about the topical "Military History" tag? And then what if we also want specialized tags for very popular topics, a "World War II" tag, or, yes... a "Hitler" tag?
As such we are faced with two prospects. Either a tagging system that is very imprecise and inconsistent, or else one in which we create combo tags, and quickly they number beyond anything usable (lets say we have only 5 different time periods, and 6 continents, and tag for each combo, we already have 30 tags, and suffice to say that is still a very broad breakdown, and again, avoids topical ones like 'MilHist' or 'Technology' or 'Religion' and so on...).
So in short, tagging questions quickly becomes a very unworkable system for a history subreddit, and for that reason, we have decided not to pursue it.
I don't think there's any simple solution to the overabundance of WWII submissions. Perhaps a very temporary ban on the subject with a stickied modpost containing links to the most commonly asked questions or the most extensively answered threads, but I don't think that would really be fair.
I, too, am tired of all the Hitler/WW2 questions, but I can't think of a solution that would remain true to the spirit of this subreddit.