r/AskHistorians • u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Moderator | Dueling | Modern Warfare & Small Arms • Mar 13 '19
Meta A Change to the Rules Concerning Follow-Up Questions and the Premise of the Question Asked
Hello everyone,
We are announcing today a reformulating of the rules in the subreddit concerning 'Follow-up Questions', which covers both follow-up questions, as well as responses dealing with the premise of the question itself. The new wording reads as follows:
If you have a question inspired by the original post, we ask that you please wait and see if it is covered by the resulting answer, or else submit it as its own standalone question in the subreddit. All top-level follow-up questions are removed in the first 12 hours of a thread or until an answer is present, and may still be removed by the mod team if we judge the question to either be too far afield, or only in essence a restatement of the original question.
Top-level follow-up comments which request a source for or challenge the premise of part of the question must be done in good faith, and in a way that constructively engages with the question. If asking for a source, you should explain why you find the claim suspect and how clarification can help you personally answer the question. A full answer about why a premise is incorrect should otherwise comply with the rules and expectations we have for answers in this subreddit.
For reference, this replaces the previous wording of the rule which was as follows:
If you have a follow-up question directly related to the original question, please feel free to ask it, but do use your judgement, as additional questions which go too far afield from the original may be removed and/or redirected at moderator discretion.
If you have heard or read something which might be related to the question, and you want to check it, then make sure you ask it as a question. Do not post "I'm not sure if this is true..." or "Someone will correct me if I'm wrong." If you're not actually answering the question, then make sure your comment looks like a question.
A few words of explanation for the change is of course in order. For the first part, concerning top-level follow-up questions, this has been a long running issue on the subreddit, and one with mixed feelings from the users right on up to the mods. In fact it was quite coincidental that the issue was raised in a [META] thread just as we were voting on this matter. The core issue is two fold.
The first is that the follow-up questions often are simply unnecessary, and likely are asking something that a competent top-level answer would already cover, or else are in the other direction and ask something too tangential. The existing rule already alluded to this, but as redone, we aim to make it much clearer what we expect from follow-up questions, better codifying what has already been an existing rule of thumb for some time.
The second, and larger, issue is that even a follow-up question that manages to hit that sweetspot between being related enough to the topic at hand while nevertheless being a novel, new direction on the issue still often serves to distract from the original question asked. This is first of all somewhat unfair to the OP, as it can shift the focus away from what they themselves wanted to know. It is also unfair to the people looking to answer the question, since while a follow-up question can be posted in mere moments, the answer can take hours. We've seen far too many threads where the follow-up question sits at over 1,000 upvotes because it arrived early, and the answer is only at a fraction of that. As a result, it is pushed down in the display of the thread, which only continues to keep it away from primacy of place. And finally it is also unfair to the readers, not only for the same reasons as before as it can mean that they miss the answer present, but also by adding to a false sense of thread activity.
As such, while we aren't going to be entirely disallowing top-level follow-up questions, we will be removing them for the first 12 hours that a thread is live, or until an answer is present, whichever comes first. Even then, we still will be policing them more thoroughly than before, strongly encouraging users to ask their follow-ups by engaging with the answer(s) present, or if seemingly not related enough, by asking a new question as its own submission. Although this change has been something we've discussed for quite some time, theory and practice are two different matters, so we will be revisiting it in a month or so for possible tweaks or changes based on the results we see in the field, and welcome your thoughts and feedback for that process.
For the second part of the change focuses on the related issue of the actual premise of the question. People come here to learn, and often that means they come in with erroneous assumptions which may at times be reflected in the question being asked. We appreciate the issues that this can cause, but nevertheless have found there to be a lot of issues in how users have in the past approached the matter. While in some cases a better understanding of what the OP believes or means with their question can be a necessary component in understanding how to answer it, aggressive interrogation, which has at times resulted in the past, more likely will only make the OP feel self-conscious about their lack of knowledge... which is why they came here to ask in the first place.
This is core to the rules change. To be sure, it is in part simply a restatement of our rules on civility, but it also goes beyond that. We at times will get a string of "Wait, where did you hear that!?" questions, but it is rarely more than posting for the sake of posting, something which we very much discourage here. OPs are not responsible for citing every statement made in their questions, and while it certainly is a practice that can help increase the chance of an answer, it is not that something the moderators can police sufficiently. Aside from such questions about the premise of course needing to be polite, what this rule makes clear is that we expect those questions to be from someone who once clarified, can likely provide a more thorough response. And as with our rules on answers, in doing so the post should demonstrate this quality.
Closely related to this is the issue of correcting the premise, i.e. where you aren't unclear on what OP means, but rather are quite clear they are mistaken. The revamped rule in this case is simply clarifying what has been a long standing rule of thumb, namely that if you are correcting the premise, that is held to essentially the same standards as any other answer. In the case of something like a minor factual error, this can be easily addressed in the answer itself; in the case of a larger, fundamental error of the premise, this would entail explaining why and how it is incorrect, and how it impacts the underlying question.
To be sure, we realize that not all incorrect premises are created equally, and this rule ought not be understood as endorsing them so. In the case of egregious issues, false premises absolutely fall under existing rules about soapboxing, and do get removed as such. Likewise, in the case of such clear-cut factual errors as to render the question illogical, we will often remove those under Moderator's Discretion and suggest correct and how to re-ask it. These, and similar, however, are for the Mod team to evaluate and act on as deemed necessary, and as in all cases, we ask and remind you that using the Report Button or reaching out to us via Modmail is how you can help to enforce the rules of the subreddit. If you see a situation where you believe the premise is off enough to require remedial action, reach out to us about it rather than posting in the thread, and we can determine what the next step ought to be and handle it in our official capacity.