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Can we expand the first section of the FAQ to something like this:

What kind of questions can I ask here?

History - Stack Exchange is for historians and history buffs. If you have a question about...

  • topic 1
  • topic 2
  • topic 3
  • topic 4

and it is not about...

  • topic 5
  • topic 6
  • topic 7
  • topic 8

... then you're in the right place to ask your question!

Please look around to see if your question has been asked before. It’s also OK to ask and answer your own question.

I was thinking something like that format. If you can fill in the topics, that'll be great. This will help solve many problems of off-topic, low-quality questions. Right now this FAQ section is rather vague.

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All of the Beta sites follow the same format and have the same guidelines. Once we have moved beyond Beta we can begin to look at developing our own formats for the FAQs and start to develop our own procedures and guideleines. Right now our primary focus needs to be on improving our metrics so that we can get out of the Beta phase. – Steven Drennon♦ Aug 21 '12 at 13:37
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I stand corrected! If someone wants to spearhead this initiative and give us some suggestions on what you'd like to see there, we can get it created. It looks like the moderators have permission to edit the FAQ, but we need the community to help us decide what we should put there. – Steven Drennon♦ Aug 21 '12 at 20:21

1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote

I'm marking this community wiki so we can change the topics per consensus. This is sort of a rough draft, so it's not final. If you think there are too many topics here, please let me know and we can clean them up as necessary.

What kind of questions can I ask here?

History - Stack Exchange is for historians and history buffs. If you have a question about...

  • Historical events

  • Cultures and historical practices

  • Famous people

  • Languages

  • Factual current political history questions

and it is not about...

  • Genealogy

  • Asking for reference material

  • Questions answered by a simple Google search

  • Predicting the future based on historical trends

  • Mythology

  • Conspiracy theories

  • Questions copied verbatim from a history test.

... then you're in the right place to ask your question!

Please look around to see if your question has been asked before. It’s also OK to ask and answer your own question.

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Thanks, I have taken these as a guideline and updated the FAQ – MichaelF Oct 1 '12 at 12:06
Can't remember what I was thinking when I wrote the fourth point. It seems those questions should belong on linguistics SE or the specific ones, e.g. ELU, Spanish, etc. Maybe I was thinking of historical languages or something. – Luke Oct 1 '12 at 13:42
How about Ancient Languages? Although we can debate that point more...at this level I think its just good to have some guidelines considering recent events and postings – MichaelF Oct 1 '12 at 17:03
The Genealogy proposal just reached beta. When it receives it's site, we'll need to change the link here. – Luke Oct 8 '12 at 14:51
Cool, if you don't have the permissions to edit the link let me know. – MichaelF Oct 9 '12 at 12:50
I don't think I can edit the FAQ quite yet. I'll edit this answer when Genealogy gets it's site. – Luke Oct 9 '12 at 17:31
@MichaelF Can you update the link to the genealogy site in the FAQ? The new address is genealogy.stackexchange.com Thanks. – Luke Oct 23 '12 at 12:37
I think that is the link there already...at least they are looking the same – MichaelF Oct 23 '12 at 13:05
The current link goes to Area51. The site is now in public beta. – Luke Oct 23 '12 at 13:07
Stupid cache gets me every time, got it cleared out and fixed now. – MichaelF Oct 24 '12 at 9:43
In honor of history.stackexchange.com/users/1484/user2645 I've added a line item about history test questions. – T.E.D.♦ Nov 9 '12 at 20:10
I wouldn't phrase it that way. In fact, there's nothing wrong with homework questions in themselves. The problem with that particular user's questions were that they were waaaaaaaay too broad. Answering them completely in one book would have been difficult. This more falls under the "If you can imagine an entire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much" point from the next section. Besides that new point is not going to give a good impression to new users. If it were up to me, I'd leave it out. – Luke Nov 9 '12 at 20:16
@Luke - That's why I put the word "verbatim" in there. Any self-respecting essay question for a history test will have exactly the property you describe. The goal of an essay question is to be open-ended enough that a reasonably knowledgeable student could prove that knowledge by discoursing at length on the topic. That's exactly the kind of thing you'd want out of an essay question, and exactly the kind of thing we don't want here. – T.E.D.♦ Nov 12 '12 at 19:52
Although I agree, I don't think that's the best way to put it. If you can think of something better, let me know. However, I think the "entire book" point covers this situation quite nicely. – Luke Nov 12 '12 at 19:54
@Luke - I changed the "your" to "a". Perhaps that makes the point a wee bit less confrontational. Does that help? I agree that the other points should cover this case too, but I'm a believer in being explicit about instructions when multiple people have missed the implied instruction in the past. – T.E.D.♦ Nov 12 '12 at 19:55
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