@MohammadSakibArifin has asked a number of questions similar to Did Muhammad send a letter to the ruler of the Byzantine empire?. At first, I misunderstood the questions; I thought these questions were doubting the accepted narrative. After some discussion, I now understand that these are part of a pattern of shoring up sources (what in my field we call "improving assurance").
I believe it is a core part of the practice of history to scrutinize sources, to look for supporting and conflicting sources; doing so provides valuable context and assurance.
How do we distinguish between questions that merely indicate that the querent is unwilling to accept historical narrative (which give me a mental rash), and questions like Mr. Arifin's that seek to examine the role of the source in the historical narrative.
@NSNoob expresses the problem in a comment to that question, which I'll repeat here for convenience,
This is kind of like "Wikipedia says Allies won WW2. But I see no information about the authenticity of this conclusion. Do historians accept it?". It would be a good question if you were to show your research as to why you don't believe Wikipedia article isn't authentic enough and why would you tend to believe otherwise
Most of the "Questioning the narrative" questions fall into the trap that @NSnoob describes.
I think that Called2Voyage's suggestion of a meta-template for questions of this type would both resolve the pattern for Mr. Arifin, and encourage more of the kind of questions we want.
I just re-read this and it sounds horrifically pretentious, for which I apologize. I think the question is important even though I've expressed it badly.
