Methodology
How a reference entry is compiled
A reference entry is a set of documented statements, not a summary of what is generally believed. Each statement must be traceable to a source that was actually read, at a location a reader can check. Where the record is silent or sources disagree, the entry says so.
Evidence before prose
A fact is admitted only when it has been read in an identified source, at an exact location (a catalogue field, a page, a figure), with the passage kept verbatim. A citation, an identifier or the knowledge that a source exists is never evidence on its own: the source has to be consulted.
Official access points only
Authority data is read from the institutions that maintain it, through their published interfaces: the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (Gemeinsame Normdatei, MARC 21), the Bibliothèque nationale de France (catalogue général, SRU) and the Library of Congress (Name Authority File, MADS/RDF). Community databases such as Wikidata are used only as pointers to which authority records exist; their values are never copied into an entry.
Precision is never strengthened
A source that states a year yields a year. A source that states a day yields a day. Approximate, qualified or ranged dates ('circa', 'about', 'between') are preserved as written and withheld from the entry rather than rounded into a figure the source did not state.
Disagreement stays visible
When two institutions state different values, both readings are recorded side by side with their locations. Nothing is averaged, and no reading is deleted; an unresolved conflict blocks the statement from the entry until it is documented.
Identity before facts
Before any value is taken from an authority record, the record's own name must be a recognisable variant of the entry's name and its class (person, organisation, place, work) must agree. When either check fails, the record is set aside for human review, even if it agrees with everything else.
Fail-closed and permanent
Every consultation is written to an append-only ledger: the snapshot of what the source returned, the exact locators, the assertions read, the candidate values and the decision taken on each of them. When a source cannot be consulted (a refusal, an outage), the record waits for it; unavailability is never read as absence, and no page is altered on that basis.
Publication is a separate act
Reconstructed statements remain unpublished candidates until a complete replacement for the same address passes every check: identity, precision, provenance, conflicts, rights and accessibility. Until then the existing entry stays visible and unchanged, and earlier revisions are kept so that any change can be reversed.
The documented pilot
The entry on Pier Luigi Nervi is the pilot for this method. Each of its statements is bound to admitted claims; its Evidence mode lists the source and location behind every one of them, names each source once, and keeps every locator.
This page describes the process actually enforced by the platform. It does not claim that every entry has already been through it; entries that have are marked as such, and the reference updates page records what changed and when.