Open Questions

Open The Uyghur Internment in Xinjiang

Why It Is Open The OHCHR's 2022 assessment documents serious human rights violations across the Xinjiang internment system, but China has not granted independent international access to detention facility records or mortality data, and no independent body has published a verified death toll.

What Would Settle It Independent international access to detention facility records and mortality data, which has not been granted to date.

Expertise Needed Human rights documentation

Question posed in OHCHR Assessment of Human Rights Concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China, United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Open The 1391 Massacres of Spain's Jewish Communities

Why It Is Open Modern scholarship documents that survivors of the 1391 massacres either converted, often under direct threat, or fled to Islamic-ruled territory, Navarre, Portugal or France, but no source checked gives a reliable numeric total for those who fled distinct from those who converted or were killed. The one round figure found in circulation (a "100,000 fled" alongside equally round conversion and death figures) is inconsistent with the death-toll range already carefully sourced here and was judged unreliable rather than written.

What Would Settle It A demographic study of Iberian Jewish community registers or tax rolls before and after 1391, cross-referenced against the destinations named in contemporary accounts (North African, Navarrese and Portuguese Jewish community records), of the kind that has been done for the 1492 expulsion but not, so far as could be found, for 1391 specifically.

Expertise Needed Historical demography

Question posed in Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (2014), David Nirenberg.

Open The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain

Why It Is Open Contemporary chronicles (Bernaldez among them) and modern accounts alike describe severe hardship during the 1492 expulsion journey, disease, starvation, robbery, shipwreck and, in some accounts, refugees thrown overboard by ship captains, but no source checked, including Jonathan Ray's standard modern academic treatment "After Expulsion," gives a numeric mortality estimate for the journey distinct from the total number expelled, which is already recorded here as a displaced range.

What Would Settle It A dedicated demographic or archival study specifically isolating expulsion-journey mortality from the wider 1492 to 1497 diaspora experience, of the kind Kamen's 1988 Past and Present article did for the total population expelled but for which no equivalent study covering deaths in transit could be found.

Expertise Needed Historical demography

Question posed in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition, Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.).

Open The Kishinev Pogrom

Why It Is Open Secondary accounts of the April 1903 pogrom's property destruction disagree in a way that reads as citation drift rather than independent corroboration: the number "2,000" recurs but is applied inconsistently to "families" in some accounts and "people" in others, for what appears to be the same underlying claim, and neither version was traceable back to the established academic source already cited here, Judge's "Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom" (1992).

What Would Settle It A page-level check of Judge's 1992 monograph, or the contemporary Russian official commission of inquiry it draws on, for its own stated count of families or individuals left homeless, distinct from the homes-and-businesses-destroyed figures already recorded here.

Expertise Needed Historical demography

Question posed in Judge, Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom (1992), Edward H. Judge.

Open The Würzburg Witch Trials

Why It Is Open Contemporary execution lists survive for parts of the Wurzburg episode, but the trials ran across the city, the surrounding prince-bishopric and its wider territory, and different surviving lists count these differently; the records are incomplete and no modern historian has reconciled them into a single agreed total, unlike the single well documented parish record behind the Torsaker toll or the court record behind Salem's.

What Would Settle It A systematic reconciliation of the surviving city, diocesan and territorial execution lists against one agreed boundary for what counts as the Wurzburg trials, of the kind regional archival historians have already carried out for other German territories.

Expertise Needed Early modern German history; archival history of the witch trials

Question posed in Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History, Wolfgang Behringer.

Open The Yellow Turban Rebellion

Why It Is Open Historians frequently repeat casualty figures in the millions for the rebellion, but these numbers, where they can be traced at all, describe the population loss of the following decades of civil war, famine and displacement across northern China rather than deaths in the rebellion itself, and no modern historian has isolated a defensible toll for the rising and its suppression alone.

What Would Settle It A modern historian's attempt to separate combat and reprisal deaths during the 184 CE rising itself from the much larger population loss of the decades of civil war, famine and displacement that followed it and that the rebellion helped set in motion.

Expertise Needed Han dynasty history; historical demography of early imperial China

Question posed in The Encyclopedia of Taoism, Fabrizio Pregadio (ed.).

Open The Cultural Revolution

Why It Is Open The Cultural Revolution's suppression of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Confucianism and Christianity is well documented, but no historian has published a death toll isolating deaths caused specifically by anti-religious persecution from the campaign's much larger political death toll, itself estimated across a wide range by different historians.

What Would Settle It A study disaggregating Cultural Revolution-era deaths by the target's religious identity or role, comparable to the campaign-specific tallies that exist for other twentieth-century religious persecutions elsewhere in the atlas.

Expertise Needed Modern Chinese history

Question posed in Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule, Fenggang Yang.

Open The Affaire de Bizoton

Why It Is Open No trial transcript survives. The case is known only through accounts by foreign observers who had arrived already persuaded of the charge, above all Spenser St John, who published his twenty years afterwards and who recorded that the confessions had been beaten out of the accused. The court proceeded in French before Creole-speaking defendants, and the Haitian government, seeking diplomatic recognition, had an interest in a public conviction watched by European envoys. No scholar holds a reconstruction of the events, because there is nothing to reconstruct one from.

What Would Settle It Recovery of Haitian judicial or police records for 1864, whether in Port-au-Prince or in the French, British and American consular archives that received contemporary reports, together with a critical edition of the surviving foreign accounts collated against one another rather than read singly.

Expertise Needed Caribbean archival history and the history of criminal justice, with Haitian Creole and nineteenth-century French palaeography.

Question posed in Hayti, or the Black Republic, Spenser St John.

Open The Deorala Sati of 1987

Why It Is Open Contemporary accounts contradict one another completely, and no court has made a finding. The prosecutions for abetment and for glorification ran for decades and ended in acquittals, the last in 2024, so nothing was ever established judicially. Witnesses were villagers in a community under intense external scrutiny, and the accounts collected at the time were gathered by parties with declared positions on the question.

What Would Settle It A judicial or commission finding on the abetment question, which the acquittals have now foreclosed; failing that, a scholarly reconstruction that collates the police record, the contemporary press, the depositions and the investigations by women's organisations against one another and states what each can and cannot support. Such a collation has not been published.

Expertise Needed Legal history and the sociology of contemporary India, with access to the Rajasthan police and trial record.

Question posed in The Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987, Parliament of India.

Open Alevism

Why It Is Open No government census in Turkey records sect within Islam, so every published Alevi population figure is a scholarly or advocacy estimate; the widely repeated ten to twenty million range is quoted across sources without a shared reference year.

What Would Settle It A dedicated demographic survey fielded in Turkey that asked about Alevi identity specifically, dated and methodologically documented, would let a real time-stamped estimate replace the undated range in circulation today.

Question posed in The Alevis in Turkey: The Emergence of a Secular Islamic Tradition, David Shankland.

Open BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha

Why It Is Open BAPS separated from the Vadtal diocese of the Swaminarayan Sampradaya in 1905 to 1907, a parent body distinct from BAPS itself, but no entity for that diocese or for the wider Swaminarayan Sampradaya as a parent organization currently exists in the atlas, so BAPS's branch-of relation has no live target to point at.

What Would Settle It Minting a denomination entity for the Swaminarayan Sampradaya, or specifically its Vadtal diocese, with its own sourced facts, would let BAPS's branch-of relation and any other Swaminarayan-descended body's equivalent be written honestly.

Question posed in History and Milestones (BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha, baps.org), BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha.

Open Celestial Church of Christ

Why It Is Open The church has no central membership roll and has been repeatedly divided by succession disputes since the 1980s, so published estimates of several million adherents across more than five thousand branches are given as a general "by the early 2000s" figure rather than tied to one dated count.

What Would Settle It A dated count from the church's own worldwide administration, or a fielded survey in Nigeria and Benin asking about Celestial Church of Christ membership specifically, would anchor the estimate to an actual year.

Question posed in Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand Contemporary Religious Movements, David B. Barrett.

Open Alexandrian Wicca

Why It Is Open Religious landscape surveys count Wiccans and Pagans as one combined category, and small, private, initiatory covens are not registered anywhere that would let a researcher isolate the Alexandrian line from other Wiccan traditions.

What Would Settle It A study that surveyed self-identified Wiccans on which initiatory lineage, if any, they belong to, of the kind Pagan studies scholars have occasionally run for specific regions, would let a tradition-specific estimate be drawn where only a combined one exists today.

Question posed in The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Ronald Hutton.

Open Anabaptism

Why It Is Open Anabaptism is a theological family rather than a single organized denomination; its living members already appear in the membership records of its daughter bodies, so no source totals them as one population without risking double counting.

What Would Settle It A scholarly survey that explicitly sums the reported membership of every living Anabaptist-descended body on a stated date, correcting for any overlap between them, would give the family a real combined figure comparable to a single denomination's.

Question posed in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.).

Open Basilideans

Why It Is Open No ancient source that describes Basilidean teaching, all of them hostile heresiological writers rather than the school's own records, gives any figure or even a qualitative sense of how many people followed it.

What Would Settle It New papyrological or epigraphic evidence from Roman Egypt naming Basilidean adherents or congregations, of the kind that has occasionally surfaced for other early Christian and Gnostic groups, would be the only realistic path to an actual estimate.

Question posed in What Is Gnosticism?, Karen L. King.

Open Breslov Hasidism

Why It Is Open Breslov has no central membership roll, so the scholarly estimate of its committed core is a researcher's reading of community size rather than a dated census, and the sources reporting it do not state the year the underlying fieldwork or count was made.

What Would Settle It A published methodology note from the estimate's original researcher, or a fresh dated count of registered Breslov institutions and their affiliated households, would anchor the figure to an actual year.

Question posed in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, Gershon David Hundert (ed.).

Open Church of Satan

Why It Is Open The organization has treated withholding a precise membership figure as deliberate policy since its founding, and no outside demographic survey counts organized Satanists as a category distinct from the wider religiously unaffiliated population.

What Would Settle It A survey instrument that asked specifically about affiliation with the Church of Satan, fielded independently of the organization itself, would be the only way to move past both the organization's own silence and the guesswork that fills it.

Question posed in Church of Satan (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors.

Open Dianic Wicca

Why It Is Open Religious landscape surveys count Wiccans and Pagans as one combined category, and small, often women-only covens outside any central registry leave no record a researcher could use to isolate the Dianic line from other Wiccan traditions.

What Would Settle It A study that surveyed self-identified Wiccans on which lineage or current, if any, they follow, of the kind Pagan studies scholars have occasionally run for specific regions, would let a tradition-specific estimate replace the combined figure in circulation today.

Question posed in Dianic Wicca (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors.

Open Dragon Gate

Why It Is Open China's official Daoist registration counts ordained monastics through the China Daoist Association and individual monasteries, not by which of Quanzhen's lineages a monastic was ordained into, so Dragon Gate clergy are never broken out from the wider Quanzhen or Zhengyi totals.

What Would Settle It A published survey of ordination records naming lineage affiliation across China's registered Daoist monasteries, of the kind scholars of contemporary Daoism have occasionally attempted for individual monasteries, would let a lineage-specific figure be drawn where only a combined one exists today.

Question posed in Daoism Handbook, Livia Kohn (ed.).

Open Eclectic Solitary Wicca

Why It Is Open Solitary practice leaves no coven roll, initiation record or central registry by design, and religious landscape surveys count Wiccans and Pagans as one combined category rather than separating solitary eclectic practice from initiatory lineages.

What Would Settle It A large-scale self-identification survey that asked Wiccans specifically whether they practice solitary and eclectically, rather than within an initiatory lineage, would let a real estimate be drawn where only a combined Wiccan/Pagan figure exists today.

Question posed in Eclectic Wicca (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors.