I'm not sure if I'm just paying more attention, but I have the impression that there are a lot more questions (and especially popular questions, getting attention on /r/all) with the following format:
Is it true that "assertion put into quotation marks here"?
I have a hard time with these questions because I feel like without attribution or context for the quote, it's sometimes difficult to properly evaluate and provide an actual in-depth response.
If we required attribution or context for these quotes, the answers would get much better. If the quote is from a secondary source, attribution is both academically necessary and makes it far easier to research the quote in question, and would help students of history understand the merits or challenges with secondary sources. If it is an assertion found in popular media, we could trace the historiography of the assertion (whether or not it is accurate). If it's something more in the lines of an urban legend, we can trace or discuss the origin and spread of that myth and the historical context that surrounds it.
What are people's thoughts on this? I feel like it would be a pretty minimal ask to just require posters to put context in the text portion of their post, and it could provide benefits to the answers.
I propose we make a rule change requiring posters who are asking about the truth of a specific historical assertion or quote to contextualize it by at least providing where they discovered the assertion
We really try not to have too many rules when it comes to asking questions. There are a lot of conventions which we suggest, and this already falls under that, but it isn't a rule, and it is unlikely to become one. We neither want to create an excess of labyrinthian rules that must be navigated to ask a question, nor place more burden on ourselves in enforcement than we deem necessary via-a-vis potential pay-off.
The only real exception to that is when we believe the quoted text is part of an effort to not post in good faith, or otherwise soapbox, but insofar as a user might just say "is this correct?", in the end, it is just the user hurting their own chances of getting an answer, so falls under "Asking questions badly" rather than "Asking bad questions". The rules are concerned with the latter more than the former. Certainly, users should try to be conscious that the more context they give for something like a quoted piece of text, or a video/article, that they want fact-checked, the easier it is to have someone answer it, but we can only do so much in telling people how to ask questions.
As a side note, I would just add that while the rules allow for META threads to discuss subreddit issues, the prefered convention, if you have specific rules suggestions, is to bring them directly to the moderation team via modmail.