1. What Gnorium publishes

Gnorium publishes two kinds of record. A biblio-record describes a source: a book, a manuscript, a letter or another work, with images of its pages and their markup. A lexico-record describes a word, phrase, or affix: its forms, its origin, and its sentiments, each attested by passages from sources that Gnorium holds.

A biblio quotation is running usage in a biblio title's testament; a lexico quotation is running usage in a lexico title's sentiment. An explicit named reference is a citation of a bibliographic or lexicographic item.

Every record keeps its history. Each change makes a new vignette, named by the time it was made (in UTC), and earlier vignettes stay readable. Nothing in a record is overwritten without a trace.

2. Machines draft, people permit

AI models do much of the drafting. They attribute a source (work out its title, authors, date and other details), explicate it (read the text in its page images), explicate a word (group its uses into senses and write definitions) and translate records into English or into a word's own language.

No machine output becomes part of a record by itself. A person sends each piece of work to the machines, and a person decides whether what comes back is permitted into the record. Machines never pass work to each other, and they never submit or approve anything on anyone's behalf.

• Anyone with an account can submit a testament or sentiment (a folksong), suggest changes to work in progress, submit an amendment to a record, and take part in the discussion.
• Sending work to the machines (committing it) and admitting it into a record (permitting it) are done by Gnorium's editors.
• What a record has undergone is shown on its page as its process: explicated; translated.

3. The Disputorium and the Computorium

Gnorium's editorial work happens in two rooms, both open to read.

• The Disputorium is where people work. Folksongs and amendments arrive here, work in progress is examined and corrected, and editors decide what is committed to the machines and what is permitted into a record.
• The Computorium is where machines work. Each nocturne shows the model's steps as it takes them, and it keeps them afterwards.

A source moves between the rooms in steps. Evidence opens a working copy whose details people settle. It is committed to be explicated (a source from its pages, a word from its quotations); that result can be permitted, or committed to be translated. Each step is a separate object in Mission Control, with its own page, history and discussion.

4. Provenance

• Every act is signed. People are credited by their username, and machine work is bylined “By gnorium”.
• Each object shows its pedigree: the chain of submissions, commits and permits that led to it, with who did each and when.
• A machine run is published with the model that made it, the instructions it followed, its reasoning, the tools it used, and the confidence it stated, where it stated one. Reading these is free, for everyone.
• Every change between vignettes, and every change people suggest to work in progress, is shown as a diff.

5. We don't edit machine output

What a model says is published as the model said it. If its output breaks the instructions it was given, for example by claiming more confidence than its evidence supports, we record the problem and show it; we don't quietly correct the output. When people disagree with a model, they correct the work in the open, by a suggested change or an amendment, and that correction is itself signed and kept.

6. Sources and attestations

• Gnorium collects works that are in the public domain. Each one enters as evidence, with images of its pages, and becomes a biblio-record.
• A sense of a word is attested only by passages from sources Gnorium itself holds. Each passage is a pointer into a vignette of a testament's markup, so you can open the page image it comes from and read it in context. Quotations are never typed in from elsewhere, and we don't copy other dictionaries' choices of quotations.
• A sense is dated only by the passages that attest it. A sense with no attesting passage is not published. Where a source states its own date for something, the record cites it as the source's statement, not as an attestation.
• Other reference works may be consulted and cited as sources; they are credited where they are used.

7. Dates

Every year Gnorium displays carries its era, so that a date is never ambiguous: “AD 1613”, “384 BC”, “c. AD 1500”, “AD 1560 – AD 1565”. A date is given only as precisely as its evidence allows. Editorial acts are stamped with their exact date and time.

8. How to contest a record

If you think a record is wrong or incomplete, submit an amendment from the record's page. Say what should change and why, and point to evidence.

• An amendment becomes a palinode. A palinode reopens the record at the step it had reached, and the reopened work goes through the same process as before, in the open.
• If the result is permitted, it becomes a new vignette of the record. The earlier vignette stays in the record's history, with the diff between them.
• You can also suggest a change to any work in progress in the Disputorium before it is permitted.

9. Locutions and moderation

• Each object in the Disputorium has a thread of locutions: short, signed arguments about that object. You can also react to a locution or to an act in the thread.
• Once an object is permitted, its thread is frozen. Nobody can add to it, edit it or delete from it, so the reasons for a decision stay as they were.
• Moderators and editors can hide a locution that breaks the Terms of Service. A hidden locution is marked with who hid it and when; its author can still read it, and hiding can be undone. Every hide and unhide is logged.

10. Neutrality

Gnorium describes how words have been used, as its sources show. It doesn't rule on correct usage, and where sources disagree, a record cites them rather than choosing silently. Records follow the evidence, not the standing of whoever argues for them. Nobody can pay to have a record written or changed, and Gnorium carries no advertising.

11. Contact

To report an error you can't fix through an amendment, or to raise a concern about this policy, write to info@gnorium.com. Complaints about content are handled as the Terms of Service describe.