Yes! I am completely in favor of implementing a rule that requires the moderators to assess the quality of answers' writing.

You see, the primary task of the mod team--making sure answers adhere to good historical practice (accurate, in-depth, comprehensive, sourced) can be compared to a nonprofessional version of peer review. Peer review is considered a service to the historical profession and thus unpaid labor.

The second major task of the mod team, keeping the subreddit in line as an Internet community, has become the traditional work of unpaid volunteers dedicated to the site at hand.

But assessing the quality of writing, now? The average editor's salary, per Google, is around $56,000 per year. This is somewhere around what a college professor of writing and rhetoric (freshman writing, generally) might make. Browsing Craigslist, one on one tutoring and feedback can earn you $15-$60 an hour, depending on how bit a cut the organizing company is slicing away.

I'm sure I speak for the mod team as a whole when I say I am so excited for AskHistorians to move into the business of critiquing users' writing.

Would asking for a TLDR on responses longer than 1000 words be antithetical to the subs agenda?

Essentially yes. It's been mentioned before that we have no interest in any kind of TL;DR requirement, with not the least of our concerns being that there is often no TL;DR that can do the question justice while maintaining integrity. Users are of course free to provide them, but that is all their choice.

To be frank, this is not a TLDR sub. This is a sub that explicitly requires that answers be well sourced, accurate and comprehensive. In many cases, this can require a long answer. In many other cases, it is well within the spirit of this sub to give a longer, more complex answer that expands the context of the original question.

History is a complicated field because everything that happens in history is inter-related. There are no discrete historical facts - there are many inter-related factors that together give context to whatever facts* one can name. Simply making a statement of historical fact without context is not good history. Moreover, history is a field where what was said about a subject in the past (the historiography) often (at the academic level, always) needs to be taken into account when addressing a subject, because that informs how we view our sources.

Speaking for myself, I often use answers as way to expand upon the question's context. People may ask about, say, the use of swords in late medieval Europe, but we can't understand -why- they were more common without going into some economic and technological history. A good AH answer (or good historical writing generally) isn't just an snapshot of a single 'piece' of history - it's a window that invites further questions and opens up a fuller view of the historical period discussed.

Speaking about this particular example, I know that OP admits that it's not a great candidate for a short answer - the origin of racism is a massive topic in history, that requires (as the original answer did) untangling the color prejudices of the Ancient World from the racism of the modern world. The TLDR OP provides is itself revealing - I don't think this is a good summary of the original answer, since it leaves out the mutually reinforcing nature of slavery and prejudice, and doesn't capture the genuine changes of attitudes toward people of different skin tones that occur during the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern period. This is why we don't do TLDRs, and we're never going to request them of answerers - if historical expertise could be summarized in sentences, we'd do it. We can't.

The final issue is that this sub runs on the contribution of its answerers (and its askers! Keep asking good questions!) and, speaking for myself, I will not make demands on answerers beyond our sub's already high standards of accuracy, decorum, and conduct.

*Yeah, what is a historical fact? How do we know what is true? Let's leave that aside for now.

If my opinion means anything, I prefer the longer answers with detail and sourcing. This sub has been a great find for me.

I'm not a professional historian, and I'm not doing primary-sources research {I have a 50-hr/week job that I get paid to do ;-) }, but I am pretty serious about the subject and need something more than cable-channel "documentaries" that play up the lurid and the sensational and waste time analyzing 300 as if it were accurate history.

"Pop history" books and websites (and shows) tend to be filled with trite conventional answers split between Victorian-era mistakes and the most "hot take" "counter-convention" current ideas they can find.

On the flip side, anything more studious and considered than that sort of thing seems fixated on the academic, process side of studying the subject, rather than the subject itself. I'm reading through an academic book on ancient Mesopotamia at the moment, and it spends more time on the sources and references than it does on actual details and depth.

Many of the "flaired" responses I'm reading in this sub are right in the sweet spot between those two extremes.

There needs to be a distinction between a TLDR and a thesis sentence. A long answer isn't necessarily a better one, the key thing is that the presentation and writing style communicates the content of the answer effectively. I would posit that any answer that is moderately long (say 300 words and above) should begin with a thesis sentence that accurately provides a summation of the following paragraphs, and of course longer answers would merit several thesis statements. These can be bolded to allow for greater readability.

Just because we don't want a TLDR requirement doesn't mean there aren't ways to improve readability and presentation.

Frankly, the answer you linked to is in and of itself a TL;DR when you consider how much scholarship was succinctly distilled into that 2,000 word answer.

I also think your Pascal quote falls a little flat here. Most of the answers that get past this sub's version of peer review make it seem as though whoever is writing them is just casually blowing most undergraduate work out of the water. But when you think of the time it takes between a question going up and an answer appearing (there are stats somewhere I think) it becomes clear that there is a great deal of effort going into these answers. I would imagine that no small part of that time is spent trying to condense vast, sprawling subjects into concise essays.

For example, yesterday I asked about the evolution of Greco-Roman polytheism across the span of about 4 centuries. It's a question that is asking someone to discuss in detail an enormous swathe of time and geography. My suspicion is that it will go unanswered for precisely the reason that it is a daunting task to boil it down to an easily digestible format. There is no lack of users with the knowledge to answer it, but I'm asking for a good deal of their time in addition to an answer.

The other side of it is that when I'm asking a question there is usually tangential information that I suspect will be covered and often times my questions are just a way to get to that because I'm too dumb to figure out how to phrase my actual question. I think a TL;DR would ensure that follow on questions from other users will revolve around whatever listicle-type summary is provided. Not a crazy idea, given this is reddit.

So TL;DR: You're already getting TL;DRs considering how many books these people had to get through to answer a question.

Hi! I've read a bit of this thread and you're getting a lot of responses from flaired users who come here to answer, so I'd like to give the perspective of someone who asks a lot of questions to the point of being recognized for it.

I certainly can sympathize with what others have said, and I think /u/LukeInTheSkyWith especially sums it up well. Some of my questions get answered, some don't, and when they do, I'm almost always 'wowed' by the response I get, and really appreciate the time and effort that goes into it. There is a reason I don't ask my questions on /r/history or /r/AskHistory, and it is at least in part because I'm not looking for the TL;DR. To be sure, if the respondent chooses to, bully for them! I won't say "No!" to it, but it rarely adds anything. At best, it is superfluous to the existing conclusion, or often simply the writer making a conclusion paragraph as normal but just sticking "TL;DR" on there to highlight it. When it is a 'real' TL;DR though, having read the whole piece, I can say confidently that it never manages to actually convey anything substantive, which is why it is so at odds with what the point of this subreddit it! People shouldn't be coming here expecting them, and I definitely understand why writers would feel offended when that is the response they get.

I will though, note, that as a "Professional Question Asker", there are definitely ways to get briefer summaries, but it does take a bit of work. If you read through, and don't understand stuff, everyone here loves follow up questions. If you ask them, they will definitely answer it. If you feel a bit overwhelmed by someone's 50k character response, give it a skim through, figure out what you aren't understanding, and ask them to expand on that specifically, or if they could explain it a little more simply. No here is opposed to helping you understand the answer to the question, but they do want to have engagement.