How we source, judge and correct

Accuracy is a product feature here, not a disclaimer. This page sets out exactly how we decide what to publish, and it is the standard we expect readers to hold us to.

Source hierarchy

1. Archaeological reports, inscriptions and primary texts in reputable editions and translations.
2. Peer-reviewed books and journal articles by established historians, archaeologists, linguists and anthropologists.
3. Specialist reference works such as the Encyclopédie berbère, and university research projects.
4. Official language and cultural institutions such as Morocco’s IRCAM and Algeria’s HCA — cited with their national and institutional context identified, not treated as neutral authorities on every political question.
5. UNESCO and recognised heritage, language and indigenous-rights research.
6. Museum collections, excavation projects and archives.
7. Minority-rights organisations for contemporary policy and community conditions, corroborated where possible.

Wikipedia is useful for finding terminology and leads. It is not a source for substantive claims here. We do not rely on anonymous nationalist blogs, AI-generated summaries, viral maps or unsourced social posts, in any direction.

Evidence disciplines

• We do not assign modern ethnic labels to prehistoric or ancient populations without qualification.
• We distinguish linguistic, archaeological, historical, genetic and self-identification evidence, and say which is doing the work in a given claim.
• We explain the limits of ancient DNA and commercial ancestry testing rather than reporting percentages as identity.
• We do not infer a continuous nation-state from linguistic or cultural continuity.
• We identify colonial-era classifications and terminology as products of their context.
• We treat oral tradition as evidence of a particular kind — labelled clearly and compared with written and archaeological material, neither dismissed nor treated as documentation.
• We attribute contested claims to their advocates or to the scholars who argue them.
• We explain why population estimates vary rather than selecting the largest or smallest figure.
• We respect alternative community spellings and names, and note them.

Political and communal neutrality

• We do not portray Arabs, Imazighen or any other North Africans as racially pure or homogeneous blocs.
• We treat Islamisation, Arabisation, colonisation and modern state policy as distinct historical processes with different timescales and mechanisms.
• We distinguish governments, institutions, armies and movements from entire populations.
• We avoid collective blame and dehumanising language about any group.
• We represent state accounts, scholarly criticism and community perspectives, each with its evidence.
• We do not romanticise every resistance figure, and we do not read modern ethnic nationalism back into pre-modern conflict.
• The same source and evidence standards apply to every community and subject.

What we will never do

We do not fabricate quotations, sources, page numbers, inscriptions, museum accession details, population figures or linguistic examples. We do not generate Tifinagh text for decoration or invent translations. We do not publish AI-generated images of people, artefacts, inscriptions, maps or archaeological reconstructions. We do not invent expert bylines, endorsements, partnerships, testimonials or visitor statistics.

Debate boxes and uncertainty

Where evidence is genuinely contested, articles carry a “What is debated?” box setting out the competing positions and who holds them. Where something is simply unknown, we say it is unknown. A page that admits the limits of the evidence is more useful than one that does not.

Corrections

Danny Rasul is the accountable publisher. The private enquiry form accepts corrections and source suggestions; it is not an unmoderated public comment system.

We welcome evidence-based corrections: factual errors, misattributed sources, better scholarship, and spellings or names that a community prefers. Write to us through the contact page, and include the page, the specific claim and the source where you can.

Substantive corrections should be described on the affected record and reflected in its significant-update date. Minor fixes such as typography need not change a research date. A deployment, automated check or copyright-year change is not a source review. Unknown original dates are left unknown.

AI assistance and review limits

AI tools assist with research organisation, drafting, editing, code and checks. Their answers are not sources. We do not claim every existing page has received independent specialist or fluent-language review. Source checking and specialist review are separate steps; a visible source-check note describes only the checks actually performed. Incomplete name fields, uncertain readings and unresolved rights remain explicitly qualified.

The working stages are draft, researched, reviewed and published. Drafts and research candidates do not become public simply because a template can render them. References must identify the work and relevant section; a general book title or an author’s reputation is not evidence for an unchecked claim. Images and translations need their own use basis. We do not manufacture interviews, reviewer names or approvals.

Editorial pipeline

Planned articles are held in an internal editorial roadmap and are not published as pages, listed in navigation, included in search, feeds, structured data or the sitemap, or linked from public cards. If a card on this site links somewhere, there is a finished page at the other end.