Are there any historian on here that actually answer questions?…

by Impossible-Panda-119

Or am I the only one that feels like questions don’t get answered 😓

DanKensington

Yes, lots. The Sunday Digest for the week up to 2022 February 06 in fact contains 140ish answered threads (with some threads having multiple answers).

The problem is that it takes time to write an answer meeting our standards. I'm someone who works from home and sets my own schedule, so I can skive off work as much as I like - and even if I do that, it still takes me four hours from the time I spot a thread to the time I hit the post button.

Now, consider that the vast majority of our answerers have lives to live and jobs to do. In some cases, some are even teaching what they write about. And some answers will need more than four hours to write about, especially if the answerer decides to go on a deep dive on the subject, or if it's one of those questions where they don't quite know the answer but know how to find it out.

In our last flair survey, the single most common reason for not answering a question was lack of time. And by 'single most common', I mean that it outnumbers every other reason put together, several times.

Thus, we appreciate your patience while answerers go into the scholarship to provide an answer. We are quite greatly aware that this is not the usual browsing experience on reddit, which is why we have multiple possible channels to reach already-written content. Those are listed out in the AutoMod autopost at the top of every thread, and are reproduced below:

Dongzhou3kingdoms

We do get such questions every now and again if that is any reassurance.

So as Dan points out, we answer over a 100 questions each week. We also get hundreds more (as I write this line, I checked how many questions, not including this one or any in short questions thread, in 24 hours and got 121). With the way reddits systems work vs the time it can take for proper answers to be crated, answers might get missed so thankfully some hard working people have found ways of ensuring answers are highlighted as Dan has highlighted and helpfully provided links for. Sunday Digest covers all (and highlights intresting questions that might get missed), others highlight the best answers, pick whichever combination suits you the best.

For a question to get answered, it needs to be something that can be answered, get picked up amidst the flood of questions by someone who can answer. We do have some helpful elves who will notify intresting questions that might of interest to the relevant people. We sadly don't have an expert (or even more ideally, multiple) experts for all periods of history and countries and for those on AH who answer questions, it also depends what is going on in their lives. As has been highlighted, a proper answer takes time to research and write up, 3-4 hours is usual for an answer and not unknown to go longer depending on the question and what is required for the answer. Even those of a few hours might be spread over several days depending on what someone's life is like in that moment.

If there is a specific question you spot that you really want to keep an eye on, save it or bookmark it and come back in a few days to give time for an answer.

If someone reading this has never answered before and perhaps is a little nervous about trying, if you spot a question that you know the answer to and have the time, the sources on hand then please do give a proper answer. You might make someone's day as well as spreading your knowledge of history to more people.

mimicofmodes

Something else I'd add to the responses already given is that the impression of there being "no answers" comes from a really ludicrously narrow look at the sub. We get dozens of questions per 24-hr period. One or maybe two of these questions will trend and hit the front page. These questions often become popular precisely because they are not "normal" historical questions that historians have already studied and provided useful secondary sources on, so they require an extra effort from an answerer to look at and analyze primary sources from the period (often the 1970s-1980s-1990s). As a result, they take even longer to answer than a "normal" historical question and drive all the people sticking their heads into the sub into a frenzy because there!!! are!!! no!!! answers!!! (An answer nearly always does come for these trending questions, if only because someone forces themselves to write it so that we don't need to deal with the snarky comments anymore.)

But many of the dozens of other questions are getting answered in this time. It takes a few hours, sure, but the answers come. Or answers to the questions asked the previous day or over the previous week, which had to sit in new tabs until a historians had enough time to sit down and write. You can see all of these posted in the Digest. It's incredibly short-sighted and selfish to declare that questions "don't get answered" because the one question per day that interests you doesn't get an immediate answer.

kilkil

In addition to the excellent resources indicated by other comments, I would like to suggest you occasionally check /r/HistoriansAnswered.