Methodology
How entries, interviews and sources get into the museum, and how much you should trust each kind. Short version: we link to where material lives, we say what we have and haven’t opened, and we fix errors at the source.
Entries
- A person curates the list of Wikipedia pages that belong here; the text is read live from Wikipedia and is not reviewed or rewritten by us.
- Dates and coordinates come from Wikidata; images and their licenses from Wikimedia Commons.
- Connections between entries are the links between the underlying Wikipedia articles.
- Because this is live, an entry can change when Wikipedia changes. Contested claims are Wikipedia’s to resolve; use the “Improve this entry” link.
Interviews, archives and primary sources
- Each record in the catalog links to the holder; we don’t host the recordings or documents.
- Interview / talk: a recording or text of a person speaking, with interviewer and date when known.
- Archive / collection: a library or archive holding relevant material; usually a finding aid, often access by appointment.
- Primary source: material from the events themselves (period press, film, recordings, posters, letters, official records), as distinct from later retellings.
- Records found from search listings but that our automated checker couldn’t read (bot walls or script-rendered pages) say so on the card.
- A weekly script re-checks every link; failures are marked “link unverified” until fixed or removed.
- Dates marked as approximate are inferred (for example from a broadcast or post date) and say so in the notes.
- “Possible recordings on the Internet Archive” are automated, unvetted search matches. They are leads, not endorsements.
What we don’t do (yet)
- We don’t independently verify the accuracy of what is said in an interview or source.
- We don’t host copyrighted audio, video or images without permission.
- We don’t yet mark every record as opened by a human reviewer; that is on the roadmap.
Spot a mistake?
See Rights, corrections & takedowns. For encyclopedic text, the fastest fix is on Wikipedia or Wikidata, which improves the page for everyone.