Standards / how the record is kept
What we will not do to make it look better
Photographs
Every image here is openly licensed and every one names its author, its licence and the file it came from. 14 sources, 11 photographers, all credited on the card and again on the record. Nothing is used because it was easy to find — two photographs were removed from this build after their source descriptions put them outside South Africa, and the record is shorter as a result.
Places
A place is only named when the source names it. One record carries no locality at all, and its badge says unrecorded rather than borrowing a province to fill the map. A hyper-local badge is only worth reading if it is sometimes absent.
People
No invented names, no invented quotes, no composite characters. If a person is in a photograph we describe what is visible; we do not invent their job, their age or what they said. No statistic about the country appears anywhere on this platform unless we can point at where it came from.
Language
Words stay in the sentence as they are written — no italics, no quotation marks, no bracketed translation. Where a reader might not know a word, a note is available on it, and the note cites its dictionary entry so you can check us. There are 8 such notes in the current build, and a word without a note stays unexplained rather than being guessed at.
The signal bars
The small equaliser on each record is an editorial energy value — quiet, steady, bustling, loud — drawn as a stable pattern from that record’s own data. It is not a waveform, it is not a recording, and no audio plays anywhere on this site. We would rather the mechanism be honest than impressive.
Corrections
If a place, a name, a credit or a licence is wrong here, say so and it gets fixed in the record, visibly. A platform that asks people to trust its labels has to be able to lose an argument with someone who was there.
Send a correction or a story