Community guidelines

A claim about the past is worth what its evidence is worth. Link the document, name the edition, give the page. If your source is a memory of a documentary you watched, say so, and that is fine too.

The reference desk exists to make this easy. Anything you find there has a permanent link you can drop into a reply.

There is nothing wrong with a hunch. There is a great deal wrong with a hunch dressed as a finding. Two extra words, usually some form of I think, are the whole fix.

Do not fabricate a document, a quotation, an archival reference, or a scholar. Do not paste model output as if it were a source you read.

This is the one thing that gets an account removed on a first offence. A forum about primary evidence cannot survive people making evidence up.

You can say an argument is wrong, badly evidenced, or nationalist propaganda. You can say so bluntly. What you cannot do is make it about the person holding it.

Expertise is welcome and does not settle anything by itself. Neither does its absence: a well-evidenced point from someone with no credentials beats a confident assertion from someone with plenty.

Partition, colonialism, slavery, genocide, and every other subject where the historiography is a fight are all in scope here, and arguing about them is the point.

Denying a documented atrocity is not a historical position and is treated as harassment of the people it happened to.

Anyone can open a community, and each one can add rules of its own: a period, a language, a citation standard, a house style. Those rules apply inside that community in addition to this page, and never instead of it.

Every post has a report control. Reports go to a moderation queue that a human reads. Reporting something you disagree with wastes that person's time, and doing it repeatedly is itself a problem.