AskHistorians is definitely not about the length of answers, except in that it takes a fair bit of writing to communicate complicated histories. The format does

AskHistorians is definitely not about the length of answers, except in that it takes a fair bit of writing to communicate complicated histories. The format does encourage a narrative, but that's reflective of the fact that most of the people reading are laypeople, not scholarly peers who can be expected to know unstated background. If you personally find it easy to teach laypeople the breadth of a field of discourse without narrative simplification, you have a very rare skill. That said, I think many people misunderstand the discourse that's happening there. It's not academic, but instead a touchpoint between academics(-ish) and laypeople. The kinds of questions being asked are decidedly not the sorts of questions discussed in literature. Flairs in turn have to give an educated answer that actually communicates with the asker. Citations don't really fit well into what's happening for either side. They're time consuming to produce and no one reads or even understands them, nor do they provide particularly relevant information. You can't usually cite a consensus, after all.