Ah this is great - thanks for the laugh with your examples.

So IMO (that is, speaking for myself, not on behalf of the team), I don't really have a problem with those... possibly mostly because they cause little hassle for the mods.

People can ask questions about pretty much whatever they want, and more power to them if there's someone out there who can actually tackle some of these. For example, "how many people lived at x during y" might be answerable by an archaeologist or anthropologist. Ultimately, it's really difficult to define an "unanswerable question", and if some questions don't get answered (either for being unanswerable or for being overlooked), that's ok.

Meanwhile, tracking back to my earlier remark: ideally we'd like to allow really any question about history. But we have some rules that place some limits, all of which are the product of painful experience trying to moderate this place. So, we don't allow questions about current events, to avoid bunfights and ranting, or "example-seeking", to avoid getting deluged by poor answers, and so on. So, as long as a post isn't causing problems in the sub, then good luck to them, I say.

I mean, with a lot of your examples, I have some ideas of how to go about answering them, and even have some educated guesses, but as a historian (even one no longer working in the field), I often don't feel comfortable answering these kinds of questions, even if I think I know the answer.

I don't think those questions are bad for the sub, though I hope that people understand why they're often not answered -- if there's one thing that I hope that people learn from interacting with us (in addition to cool facts about history), it's how to think about history, as well as the basics of research, understanding sources, and historiography.

The thing about most of these examples is that they are answerable, just maybe not exactly as written. One of the things I think is the coolest about this sub is that nobody's bound to answer only the specific, literal question asked - so if you do know the subject or something close to it, you can answer for what is answerable.

For instance,

How many people lived in this ancient place, where they took no census and had no writing?

There may be population estimates based on cemeteries, or on the square mileage, and an answer might go into detail about how these estimates are obtained. Alternatively, they might explain that there's no way of knowing, but be able to discuss what we know about social groups there, or the types of occupations that seem to have been most prevalent. That being said, we might redirect this question to the Short Answers for Simple Questions thread instead, because it's technically just looking for a number.

Or

How much of [person's success] was based on wholly arbitrary qualities I list here?

This one might be removed by us for being a "poll-type" question that asks for an opinion on subjective qualities, but some of these are answerable. "Was [general] a tactical genius or very lucky?" could be answered to some extent with reference to the general's military education, for instance - maybe his tactics reflected standard practice at the time - or it can be shown that much of his success was related to the efforts of others, like spies that brought intelligence or saboteurs that disrupted supply lines.

The only real problem questions are the ones where the answer is just "no, they didn't," because there's often not much to expand on. But even then, you can often find an angle.

Commenting as an avid reader/lurker and very occasional questioner, I think one of the strengths of this sub is that it welcomes people who may have little idea about history to ask a question that just occurred to them after watching Marco Polo (series 1 in progress!). They often get amazing, thought-provoking answers by dedicated people with in-depth knowledge.

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I've personally found myself fascinated by answers to questions that are well outside my normal interests like, I don't know, fashion in the 15th century or something.

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So I really like the way that the sort of questions you list often provoke interesting answers that may spark the questioner to have a better understanding of our amazing world.

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Seeing the mod responses already up they don't seem to cause much hassle for them, and they seem to be 'gateway' questions.

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Long live AskHistorians!

Some questions certainly might be, or at least are quite complicated to answer sufficiently, but that is rarely an objective measure that can easily be determined in the same way, say, an Example Seeking Question, or even a "Basic Facts" question can be. For instance, some of the examples you bring up can be hard to answer well, but others are fairly well studied - such as the progression of international relations between the US and the UK. Additionally questionable premises even if unanswerable can be corrected, or be addressed with why we don't know the answer.

So in short, "unanswerable" is just too subjective a qualification for us to be able to police effectively.

I got a good chuckle out of your examples. I think the main thing is that even a poorly put question can, by a clever answerer, yield an interesting answer. It can be an opportunity for creativity for clearing up misconceptions - e.g., to someone who asks a "jihad vs crusades" type question it's possible to formulate an answer to clear up common misconceptions about the idea of "jihad".

I think I'm much more annoyed by "help me win this argument" or "plz confirm that the stupid sjw:s are wrong???" or almost any question on the pre-modern era about what skin colour someone might have had (seriously, what does it matter whether we would think of Hannibal as "black"?).

Being myself stuck in the process of trying to answer a bunch of unanswerable questions... I agree that there are many many questions that, if not impossible to answer, may require far too much time and effort, in comparison to other, still interesting questions.

At the same time, while those may take much much time for me; I don't think removing them would improve the user's experience. In fact some of those may be exactly the kind of question that could inspire some obscure specialist to post their first answer here. Also they often allow for a larger degree of "personalization" of the answer - namely that if one knows the subject enough, they could at least provide a partial but still relevant answer. I can think of more than a few of those that came to be very successful and engaging answers.

Even more, I believe that certain questions serve as a useful reminder that there are things we can't answer, that there are limits to our historical knowledge and often reasons for those limits.

One of the most recurrent "unanswerable" question is the one about the thoughts of WW1 veterans - in certain countries especially and for the vast majority of them, we don't know their opinion about anything. There was barely any interest in establishing if such opinion existed; certainly in Italy it was more urgent to shape the "veteran myth" than it was to actually inquiry about the men's thoughts.

But the realization that we don't know something is a part of understanding why we don't, which in turn - I believe - is an important part of how history should be presented to the public.

The other thing I'd say here is that, generally, upvoted questions do actually get answers. We have found that it takes an average of 9 hours for a good answer to appear on a popular thread - properly researching and writing an answer takes time - and that 90%+ of popular threads get an answer.

Also, please see this really awesome Roundtable post for a list of ways to be reminded of threads later on when they might have an answer. And if you're wondering why Reddit never shows you an AskHistorians thread with answers, consider sorting your Reddit home feed by 'Hot' rather than 'Best' - 'Best' seems to give precedence to newer posts (which are less likely to have an answer on this subreddit, of course) and threads you haven't already looked at (e.g., it'll show you something else next time you log in, even if this thread is still getting lots of upvotes because there's an actual answer now).

Alternatively, we collate the best of every week in our Sunday Digest), and daily on our Twitter, which is honestly probably the best way to find all the really good answers on the subreddit even if it's a few days behind.

I don't want to create another Meta thread, but I have a tangentially-related question about posts getting answered. How often should I re-post a question before just giving up?

Great post, thanks.

Asking questions in a good way is almost as hard as giving good answers.

I'm okay with lots of unanswered questions, because poorly phrased questions come from those unfamiliar with the historical disciplines. From there, a few questions do get answered and can spark an interest in History. After all this is AskHistorians not HistoriansTalkToEachOther, and that's what makes it great!

Though I will confess to often being annoyed at some of those same questions.