I'm just going to say that I have some training in a second discipline aside from history, and reading the "AskThatDiscipline" subreddit, with much less strenuous moderation, is a depressing experience precisely because discussion responses that are wrong or misleading and yet claim to be authoritative just sort of sit there in most threads. I don't really want to join the discussions because I feel like I could spend nearly infinite amounts of time trying to correct or improve discussion responses and yet have a stubborn (or perhaps deliberately trollish/misleading) poster just keep asking for citations or further proof.

I think the reason people post so many questions here--even if not that many get answered or spark discussion--is because they know the reliability of the answers is much greater. That requires tight moderation.

If you feel you can research on your own to know more than you originally knew, then why not just do that? Why do you even need the subreddit? Or responses in it?

This is also consistent, by the way, with history as a discipline. Historians may disagree about a great deal, but they do share a strong implicit understanding of what constitutes good or valid evidence for an interpretation. We're a research-driven discipline and we pay a lot of attention to the history of our own interpretations (aka historiography). If you want to hear from historians for some reason, then that's what you want: citations to sources, discussions of historiography. And you want them from people who know that field. I can look up materials to answer any question on this board, and as a historian, I probably have a good guess about which sources and histories to trust--but if I don't know the field at all, then I'm just showing that I know how to use a database search engine. I'm very likely to misrepresent the state of play in a particular long-running conversation between historians. There's a group of people on the Internet who are very good at quickly combining Wikipedia-level information with the first two or three Google results they find on a topic and arriving at a plausible--but often significantly wrong--synthesis account of the subject matter. Those kinds of answers are not in short supply on the Internet--why not respect one small effort to do something different?

I’m willing to wager that there are many well-informed facts posted as responses that get deleted because the bibliography isn’t perfect. And for that matter, many of the accepted posts I see have one or two sources cited for paragraph upon paragraph of information. Where does plagiarism start and citation begin? Do you even know? Do you even review? Or does one or two book titles (existing or not) satisfy your desire for clerical observance?

I think you have a vital misunderstanding of how this subreddit works. We do not require citations (except in answers used in flair applications), and never have: we require answers to demonstrate that the writer has a good understanding of the issue, and people who are well-informed about their areas of interest can often write long answers without reference to specific texts, depending on the question. We don't review an answer to check it against the bibliography because our answering users are, by and large, mature enough not to be cobbling sentences cribbed from here and there. ("Where does plagiarism start and citation begin?" is something that's really only relevant when it comes to undergrads who don't have a deeper level of knowledge and are dependent on specific texts for every point made in a paper.) Plagiarism happens here, but very rarely.

Who asks a question here and doesn’t have enough thirst for knowledge to fact-check if sources aren’t provided?

The point of this sub is that readers don't have to check every assertion, because we make sure that the half-cocked responses are removed. And frankly, so many people will just accept authoritatively-written but wrong information if they don't already have firm knowledge that it's wrong! It's a cognitive bias we all suffer from, and it happens on Twitter and Tumblr and many subs on Reddit every day. In many cases, readers don't have access to scholarly sources to do their fact-checking anyway, and may end up looking at the same faulty sources as the person who made a problematic post in the first place.

Why do the moderators of this page feel like they’re cultivating an authoritative scholarly journal for people who will believe anything they read? No one who is interested in the actual truth will follow a sub called askhistorians.

Why do you think the people asking questions and upvoting answers here aren't interested in the sub? Why does "askhistorians" imply that this isn't the "actual truth"? (Insert discussion of why there is no such thing as the "actual truth" here.) This is a bit mystifying.

I refuse to believe that none of the responses have at least a glimpse of historical truth that I can then (gasp!) research on my own to discover more than I originally knew.

There's not a lot of "historical truth" to be gleaned from shitposts and jokes about removed comments and "Yeah, this is a good question!" But if you really want to read answers containing wrong information you need to check on your own, you may be happier in /r/AskHistory.

I'm not a flaired user here, but I've answered questions where they're relevant to my subfield - or my general interest. What I'm about to say needs to be said. AskHistorians does not have a high standard of work. It really doesn't. Answers that actually try to address a question nearly always stand. Most removed comments I've seen have been off-topic, completely non-academic or more or less offer nothing to the thread. The standard for an answer here is far lower than you would see in a freshman history course. A well-read high schooler could easily provide solid answers on this sub - which is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

Basically, to write a good answer here, you need to have read some books or journal articles on a topic. That's all. Answers do not require any - let alone frequent or tedious - citations, they do not require primary sources, they don't have to be long and you don't have to be an authority on the subject. You simply have to write a detailed answer, in an academic register, which shows some awareness of the historiography and conclusions of a field. It isn't a high standard. You just have to show that you have a basic level of knowledge on a topic. You don't have to do a small thesis, as some users seem to enjoy doing, just to avoid having your comments removed.

The users here who go above and beyond are exceptionally dedicated people. I truly fear some of the users here - any grad student who puts out small monographs on reddit threads for fun will probably be unstoppable as a scholar. Many of them are early career historians with bright futures. The fact that answers of that kind of quality are common here is something that the mod team should be enormously proud of. This is one of the only history-related spaces on the internet where quality discussion is the norm, and that is an amazing service not just to this site, but to public history as a whole.

As someone who is inclined to provide succinct, scholarly but not well cited answers that are not deleted, I genuinely think you’re mistaken about the reason answers are removed. I think answers are generally removed for a clear lack of FAMILIARITY with the most important primary and secondary sources on an issue, not a lack of citing them. A historical answer that treats “fact” as separable from WHY that “fact” is generally believed to be true is not actually doing history as historians see it.

Honestly, the mods here aren't going to change anything. I'm not sure why, the sub has a lot of subscribers but no one wants totally barren threads without any discussion allowed. I've considered making a spinoff for discussion, but I don't have time to mod. I think most people who feel like this sub needs a change have given up, because you instantly get shut down without reponse when you bring up issues. I fully expect your post to be taken down along with this comment ASAP.