Editorial Standards, Citation, Reuse, and Privacy

Trust depends on more than correct-looking equations. The project uses explicit scope, canonical ownership, source hierarchy, review status, correction paths, and conservative reuse and privacy rules so that readers can judge what a page does and how strongly to rely on it.

Editorial standard

A substantive scholarly page should identify its object and scope, declare important assumptions and conventions, distinguish theorem from interpretation, and expose limitations or failure modes. Derivations belong at one canonical home. Roadmaps, applications, frontier records, and reference entries link to that home rather than silently reproducing it.

Status labels describe editorial maturity; knowledge-status labels describe the state of the subject. A polished page about a disputed claim is still disputed, and a standard result on a draft page has not thereby completed editorial review. Frontier assessments require dates and explicit evidence classes.

Every authored page is available, including empty pages marked Planned. Availability is independent of review: use the editorial status and the scope of the explanation when judging a page. More granular pages on Editorial Philosophy, Evidence Labels, Page Status Labels, and Versioning and Review Policy explain these distinctions.

Citation and source use

Sources are selected for the claim they support:

1. original papers for priority, historical events, and primary results;
2. standard textbooks for settled pedagogy;
3. reviews and monographs for advanced synthesis;
4. official documentation for software, standards, and datasets;
5. lecture notes as supplementary guidance.

References are not decoration. They should support a claim, verify a derivation or convention, document provenance, or provide a serious route onward. The site synthesizes sources in original language and does not treat AI output as a source. See Citation and Source Standards for guidance on matching evidence to a claim.

Citation and reuse

When citing a page, record its title, route, review date when shown, and access date. For a changing frontier record, also record the dated edition or status visible at the time of use. Cite the underlying primary or review source when the scientific claim, rather than this project’s organization, is the object of the citation.

Public availability is not itself a reuse license. A page, figure, dataset, notebook, or code artifact may carry its own attribution and license notice; those artifact-specific terms control. Until a sitewide content and code license is explicitly adopted and displayed, do not assume permission to copy, redistribute, or adapt material beyond rights supplied by law or a specific notice. Short quotation and paraphrase still require attribution, and external assets retain their own terms.

Privacy and external services

The policy is data minimization: collect no personal information that the project does not need, disclose analytics before enabling them, and protect contributor contact details and private correspondence. At the review date of this page, the source tree contains no configured analytics, account system, comment system, or feedback form. Hosting and network providers may still process request metadata under their own terms, and external Resource links are governed by the destination service’s privacy policy.

Do not submit sensitive personal data, credentials, private correspondence, or embargoed material through public feedback channels. If analytics, forms, accounts, or other data-collecting features are introduced, this statement must be updated before those features are treated as public policy.

Corrections to policy

Policy concerns and factual corrections follow Feedback and Contact. A policy page should be revised when implementation changes, not merely when wording is refreshed; its review date should reflect a meaningful check against the current project configuration.