Editorial Methodology

ANOMALY is an evidence-first index, not an advocacy archive. Its job is to document what identifiable sources report, connect those reports to encounters and subjects, and expose disagreements without silently resolving them into a preferred narrative.

Books, reports, papers, interviews, official files, photographs, recordings, and other works are treated as evidence sources. ANOMALY should extract relevant facts, reported observations, measurements, chronology, relationships, investigative findings, and attribution into structured records. The underlying work is not treated as content to reproduce wholesale.

Bibliographic metadata should identify the intellectual work and, where possible, the specific edition or source object actually consulted. Page, chapter, section, timestamp, archive identifier, or other locators should be retained when available so a reader can return to the underlying evidence.

Paraphrase is the default. A factual summary should be concise, neutral, source-linked, and limited to what the cited material supports. Editors should avoid distinctive phrasing from the source when the same information can be stated accurately in original words.

Verbatim quotation is reserved for situations where the wording itself is materially relevant—for example, a witness's exact statement, a disputed official formulation, terminology that must be compared across sources, or language being analyzed. Quotations should be clearly marked, attributed, and limited to the amount justified by the editorial purpose.

Additional copyright handling rules are set out in the Copyright & Takedown Policy.

A citation establishes provenance: it shows where a claim came from. It does not automatically establish that the claim is true. ANOMALY therefore keeps source reliability, claim verification, editorial workflow, and classification as separate concepts.

• Source reliability describes provenance and source quality.
• Claim verification describes the evidentiary support for a particular assertion.
• Editorial status describes whether an archive record is draft, reviewed, or published.
• Classification groups records for navigation and comparison; it is not a conclusion about origin.

A cited source can support, dispute, or contextualize a claim. Where sources conflict on dates, dimensions, identities, explanations, testimony, or interpretation, ANOMALY should preserve the competing claims separately rather than average them together or silently select one version.

Later sources that merely repeat an earlier account should not be counted as independent corroboration unless they contain genuinely independent evidence or testimony.

Terms such as reported, corroborated, disputed, explained, or hoax should describe the state of evidence for the individual claim. A claim is not corroborated simply because it appears in multiple derivative books, websites, or articles that trace back to the same originating account.

ANOMALY should distinguish verification of a record's provenance from verification of the extraordinary interpretation attached to it. Confirming that a document, witness statement, radar report, or investigation exists does not by itself confirm the claimed cause or origin of the phenomenon.

Craft and entity families group recurring reported morphology and terminology so readers can navigate related records. Family membership is descriptive. It does not prove that objects share a manufacturer or technology, that reported beings constitute a biological species, or that separate encounters share a common cause.

Controlled vocabulary should preserve source wording as aliases or contextual terms when useful while mapping records to a stable canonical term. Editorial normalization must not erase meaningful differences between sources.

Claims about identifiable people should be attributed to the source that makes them, especially where the allegation is disputed, extraordinary, damaging, or unverified. ANOMALY should not convert a source's allegation into its own statement of fact merely by removing attribution.

Editors should avoid publishing unnecessary sensitive personal information, particularly about living people or private individuals. Names and details should be included only when they are materially relevant to the historical or evidentiary record and proportionate to the archival purpose. Privacy requests are considered under the Privacy Policy.

Images, video frames, witness sketches, reconstructions, generated references, and other visual material should be labeled according to provenance. A reconstruction or reference illustration must not be presented as direct photographic evidence. Media with unclear provenance should remain explicitly marked as unresolved until its origin can be established.

Automated tools may assist with source scanning, extraction, deduplication, normalization, cross-referencing, and draft preparation. Automation does not change the evidentiary standard: published records should remain traceable to identifiable sources, and machine-generated wording or inferred relationships should not be represented as source testimony.

Where automation creates uncertainty about wording, attribution, locator, chronology, identity, or evidentiary relationship, the record should remain draft or be flagged for review rather than presented with false precision.

ANOMALY is a living archive. Records may be corrected when citations are wrong, summaries misstate a source, a duplicate is discovered, better evidence becomes available, a classification changes, or a rights/privacy review requires revision. Where practical, significant editorial changes should remain explainable through repository history, source notes, or record metadata.

Correcting or removing one claim does not automatically invalidate an entire encounter or source. Conversely, confirming one factual component of an account does not validate every associated claim.

This page is the detailed editorial policy. The shorter Methodology page remains the reader-facing explanation of the archive's evidence chain, reliability system, claim statuses, and source relationships. Where wording differs, this Editorial Methodology should guide ingestion and editorial decisions.