Sometimes there is a question that contains a clear factual error. E.g., (based loosely on a question I just read): "Why were the Soviets able to launch a satellite into space under Stalin?"
Is the preferred response a correction? Something like, "Actually, the Soviets didn't manage to place a satellite into orbit until October 1957, which was over four years after Stalin's death in March 1953. So the answer is, they weren't."
Or is it preferred to try to answer as much of the question as possible? Something like, "While the Soviet space program didn't manage to place a satellite into orbit until after Stalin's death, it did make significant gains while Stalin ruled, which I'll discuss in the next seven paragraphs before concluding with an assessment of how the Stalin-era space program laid the foundation for the notable successes under Khrushchev. . . ."
This Roundtable goes into some detail on this issue, which I'll repost:
Some questions certainly are wrong in their assumptions, but short of them violating the rules about soapboxing, we will usually approve. If a question has a wrong premise, again, removal isn't going to help the user, so there are a few possible approaches we encourage:
- Respond to the Premise: The question might be unanswerable itself, but often the premise comes from somewhere and a response can instead engage with what underlying misunderstanding might have led to it. To be sure, we expect more than "You're wrong, X never happened", and a correction of the premise should still be making a good effort in helping the OP understand what they were wrong about, but the question itself doesn't need to be answered if it makes no sense. Also remember that we very much don’t have, and don’t want, a ‘takedown’ culture. It may be a mistaken premise, but it is still asked in good faith, and should be responded to as such.
- Ask for Clarification: If you aren't sure where the misunderstanding came from, ask them a follow-up to suss out some more information. Please make sure to be more verbose than simply "What do you mean 'X'?" since we expect these types of follow-up questions to reflect explain why you find the claim suspect and how clarification can help you personally answer the question. We get a lot of people who know enough to question a premise, but not enough to actually say anything more than that, so we want to have a sense you fit the latter.
- Reach Out to the Mod Team: As noted, we do regularly remove for soapboxing, and on a case-by-case basis, we also evaluate miss-premised questions for removal, since even one made in good faith and from ignorance can at times come off as actually offensive. If you believe a question reaches this level, a short, polite message to Modmail with your reasoning is the best approach.
In the case of the hypothetical you pose:
"Why were the Soviets able to launch a satellite into space under Stalin?"
Looking specifically at the 'Respond to the Premise', I would suggest there are two main ways to approach a question which is erroneous in that kind of way. The first would be to answer about perception. That doesn't make too much sense for an approach here, unless you wanted to discuss post-Stalin perception of the USSR which would be a bit of a tangent, but there was a question in the past few days asking why there weren't prizes from governments anymore to reward important discoveries. It is a good example of this approach because the answer is technically "There still are" but certainly stuff can be written about a) why they are less prominent these days and b) the shift from government sponsorship to private sponsorship (the most famous current prize probably being the Millennium Prize, which is from a private organization).
The second way, which is more applicable here, would be to say "By the time Sputnik was launched, Stalin had been dead several years but" provide an overview of the rocketry program simply with that caveat, and especially focus on the developments which proceeded Sputnik, while Stalin was alive. The program, obviously, was not created from whole cloth in April, 1953, so while there is an error in the specifics the question is actually quite answerable when taken from one step back, as "What was Stalin's impact on the development of rocketry in the USSR?" or however you would reword that in your head.
Now, as for when a question's premise is simply illogical, then you have those other two options from the Roundtable. I would stress that is not applicable here. If someone did reach out to us, we would basically say the above, that the OP has some minor misunderstandings but they still offer avenues to talk about the topic at hand. But for a question where it doesn't matter how you squint, or how you buttress the way OP might have been led to that assumption, neither A (You're wrong but why you would think that is understandable and here's why) nor B (You're wrong on specifics, but the broad theme here is easy enough to write about) makes any sense. In that case, usually the best approach would be either to explain the errors in a non-judgemental way which asks them to, with that information, clarify what they actually are asking; or else to reach out to the moderation team with a brief explanation of why the question is illogical, in which case we'll likely to the same, or else simply remove the question with an explanation and a suggestion of how to correct to maybe make sense.
Or more succinctly, of your two options, for this question you made up, your second hypothetical answer is the better one, but there are cases where your first one would work, although we'd want it phrased more specifically into that clarification angle (with a clear display of willingness and ability to respond at length to any restated question which then makes sense). If you're ever unsure of which case is which... reaching out to us is best to do!
A response to a question that just consists of a simple correction to a factual error in the question will usually be removed. Our rules stand for all top-level responses, and this is not a mitigating factor. There are three general approaches I take to questions that contain factual errors or misconceptions. The first is if the question includes a minor factual error, but the question still stands. In this case, I'll note and correct the misconception in the opening paragraph, before moving on to answer the question. An example might be this answer on air attacks on Bismarck or this one on comparisons between the British and Japanese navies. If the question is completely wrong in its assumptions, then I will write a longer response that explains fully what actually happened. A recent example would be this one on Swedish iron ore exports. As a side-note, this is very common with questions in the form of 'why didn't X do Y?' - the answer is very often 'they did'. Finally, a question might ask about the validity of an incorrect theory put forward by another figure. In this case, I would again write a full explanation of what actually happened, or explain why the theory is incorrect. Examples would be this one on a supposed German invasion of England or this one on casualties suffered during the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands.
The preferred response is a correction, but it needs to be reasonably substantial if possible. Your second option is generally what we're looking for, although seven paragraphs are unnecessary unless you want to write that much. Our standards are never as high as some think, and then when it comes to technically unanswerable questions like this we often relax them even further depending on what the specifics of the problem question are.
I'm very late to this thread, but I've wondered about this before. I'm a scientist with a biology background, now working in infectious disease, and while this is a dramatic hypothetical, I've seen questions that contain misconceptions that read a little like "Why did it take so long to treat viruses like malaria, when most antibiotics like aspirin come from common plants?"
While I can't address this question as a historian might (and I understand that an answer that only points out technically incorrect elements of their question would be both rude and not in the spirit of the subreddit), it's well within my wheelhouse to discuss, from an academic (including timeline of scientific advances) standpoint:
Most of my sourcing for this would be of academic but scientific texts, rather than "historic" sources, e.g. letters, newspapers, contemporary commentary; I'm not sure if that's appropriate or welcome here?
I really appreciate all of the work the mods do to keep Ask Historians great! Thank you!
Can I hijack this thread for a related question?
I noticed a question last week with no responses, except a moderator deleting the question. The reason the moderator deleted the question was that, as asked, it was about events of the last 20 years. The question was nevertheless interesting and spoke to an academic literature; it simply needed to be rephrased as comparing the 70s/80s to 90s rather than 70s/80s to present. I am a non-historian social scientist and my area of expertise comes up fairly rarely, so when it does clearly I would like to help out!
As a result, I wrote what I considered to be an answer that meets AH standards. I wasn't sure if I was breaking a rule by doing so, but I wanted to err on the side of helping answer an interesting question. The moderators appear to have eventually undeleted the question, probably because of my response. Subsequently my answer got included in one of the digest posts, which was great.
It seems to me like there are a great many questions that might be rephrased along the same lines. For example, if someone would ask "Have federal law enforcement agencies ever raided an ex-president's residence?", this is a question that has an ostensibly historical character, whereas "Is the FBI's raid of Trump's residence unprecedented?" is less so, while "What do historians think of the FBI raiding Trump's residence?" is clearly just asking about a current event.
I guess my question is... was I breaking a rule or norm by rescuing the question? If not, does it maybe make sense to have the standard moderation posture for 20-year-rule violations be to encourage rephrasing the question rather than deleting? Has anyone else ever run into this?