I'm recanting
As someone who strongly argued for keeping historical research questions here, and (if those votes say anything) thereby established some of the weight of consensus to keep them, I'm changing my mind. I really don't think they belong here. Even our very own game books tell us: Go research history in history books. It'll do you and your game good.
Fortunately we have more than libraries now—we also have history.SE as a resource.
An easy litmus test
I don't think we need detailed criteria for judging historical setting questions. Merely this one litmus test:
- Would this question be on-topic for history.SE?
If it is, then it can't possibly require RPG experts and should be migrated there. This works just as easily for questions about settings that were science fiction or fantasy literature first and are still primarily so.
Questions about roleplaying settings are harder, but we're smart—we can probably tell the difference between a question that's best answered by book fans and one that's best answered by sourcebook experts. The latter should stay here and will be the vast majority.
The former will be rare judgement calls, depending on how tied to a roleplaying context the question is. If it's just "What year in (Dale Reckoning) did Drizzt fight the barghest?" then that's probably best answered by a book fan.
When all you have is a hammer
We have a hammer problem. We're gamers, we like hanging out in gamer spaces, and so we tend to bring our questions around gaming here by preference even when RPG.SE isn't the most suited Stack for the question. We've got this honestly awesome hammer, but it makes us look at too many gaming question as a nail, when really the history Stack is a much better tool for questions about real-world history. If we really value authenticity in a historical question, our duty is to migrate it to history.SE.
I'm going to go register an account there now. I've been holding this hammer too long and it's giving me hand cramps.
Post script: other SEs' answers to this issue
Writers.SE has rejected "specialist knowledge" questions
For example, if someone is writing a historical fiction, we are not necessarily any more experts on history or historical research than we are on defusing bombs.
