SOURCES POLICY · Encyclopedia page
Source Policy and Levels
سياسة المصادر ودرجاتها
The rule
No substantive information without a source. The number in brackets in the text, such as [1], points to the source in the "Sources" tab.
What is required of a source
- It must be published, and the reader must be able to consult it.
- The editor must have opened and read it. A source suggested by an artificial intelligence tool is not accepted until its existence has been verified and it has been verified to say what is attributed to it.
- The following must be recorded with it: its title, its publisher, its link, its publication date, and the date it was accessed.
The four levels
| Level | What it includes | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| L1 Primary or official | The text of a law, a court ruling, a standard, a report of an international organization | The information, on its subject |
| L2 Independent, peer-reviewed | Peer-reviewed research, independent audit | The information, within the limits of its method |
| L3 Self-disclosure | A company's technical paper, a model card, a press release | That the organization announced this, not that it is necessarily true |
| L4 Secondary | Journalism, blogs, analyses | What it relayed, to the extent of its relayer's reliability |
When sources conflict
- The one closest to the party concerned takes precedence:
- The official gazette for the text of a law.
- The court for its ruling.
- The organization for its announcement about its product.
- The conflicting value is not deleted; it is stated with its source in the "Notes on sources" section at the end of the entry.
What organizations say about themselves
It is expressly attributed to them: "The company says that...". Their announcement does not become fact without an independent source.
Terms that need caution
- "Open source": used only if established.
- "Open weights": means the model's weights are made available, not its code and data.
Quotation limits
- No published text is reproduced in full, nor are long passages.
- Verbatim quotations are short, in quotation marks, with their source.
- Summaries are in the encyclopedia's own words, and do not reconstruct the original work.
- Articles of official texts (laws, decisions) may be quoted verbatim, with the article number and a link to the official text.
Before including any external material
For an image, drawing, table, audio clip or long text, four things are checked first:
- The rights holder is known and named.
- The licence allows republication, and is stated.
- AI-generated images are labelled as such.
- No generated image resembles a real person.
The site will not build if it contains media without a licence.