Methodology
The rules this site runs on. Boring to read, important to trust.
1. Quotations
- Verified: a quotation appears as the king’s own words only when a named contemporary source or a documented text reports it. The source is cited on the page.
- Reported: single-source or secondhand reports are labeled reported with their provenance (e.g., Voltaire’s Siècle, Mirabeau’s Esprit).
- Misattributed: famous lines without contemporary attestation go in a clearly-labeled section with the evidence against them. “L’état, c’est moi” is the flagship case: absent from the Parlement’s registers, first printed in 1818.
- No quotation is ever smoothed, completed, or translated loosely without the original alongside it.
2. Dates and facts
- Certainty labels: the timeline marks every date Certain, Documented, Conventional, or Disputed.
- No invented facts. If the evidence doesn’t give a date (the Maintenon marriage), the site says so and gives the conventional placement.
- Numbers are ranges or flagged estimates where historians disagree (Huguenot emigration, war costs).
3. People and images
- Portraits are identified by artist and date. A sitter identified only as “presumed” is labeled as such.
- Contemporary vs. later: a 1900 print of a 1643 event is captioned as a 1900 print, not as a contemporary image.
- No fake history: the site never generates images of real people or real events. AI-generated images depict only the owner’s animated character (in Vizlings style) or abstract/social compositions, and every one is captioned “AI-generated dramatization art.”
4. What this site is not
- Not a biography with a thesis; it is a reference work. Judgments belong on reception & debates, with their authors named.
- Not complete: it is a curated reference, and its limitations are stated on every page’s source notes.
5. Corrections
Errors found after publication are corrected and the correction is noted in the page’s source notes. The build is versioned by date in the repository.
Source notes
- This policy was written 2026-09-26 for the Louis XIV reference site, adapting the Digital Jesus production methodology.
- Certainty-label definitions are given on timeline.md.