Help:Reading this wiki

Read this before anything else

This is the method. It is short because it has to be remembered under bad conditions.

Everything here is second-hand, unverified, or contradicted by something else here. We are not going to fix that, because it cannot be fixed — there is no authority to check the Dark against. What we can do is be exact about how we came to believe each thing, and leave the disagreements standing where you can see them.

You are not being handed knowledge. You are being taught to handle it.

Why the wiki is built this way

A cult tells you what is true. We are not able to do that and we have decided not to pretend.

Every group that has documented The Dark before us produced a tome, and every tome reads as if it were certain. The Elder Cults have lineages of them. The certainty is not evidence of knowledge; it is evidence of an institution that needed members to stop asking. When you read those sources you are reading confidence, and confidence is the cheapest thing in this field.

So the rule here is inverted. An entry that states something without saying where it came from is considered defective, however true it might turn out to be. An entry that admits it rests on one letter from one exhausted man is doing its job, even if it is wrong.

This costs us. The wiki is harder to read than a tome and it will never feel authoritative. That is the trade and we made it deliberately.

The tags

Tag claims, not paragraphs. One sentence can be firsthand and the next inherited, and blurring them is how a weak claim inherits a strong one's credibility.

Tag	What it means when you see it
firsthand	Someone claims they were there. Uncorroborated by definition — a seeker who survives an encounter is not thereby a reliable witness to it.
astroturf	A claim that is made to look like many independent people arriving at the same conclusion, and is not. Manufactured human consensus — as distinct from synthetic?, which is text with no person behind it at all.
unverified	The default state of everything here. Written down, passed on, never confirmed. Absence of this tag means nothing; assume it.
contested	Two or more accounts survive and they do not agree. Both are recorded. Do not resolve the contradiction by deleting half of it.
leaked	Taken from a cult, an agency or a private archive by someone without permission. Consider who benefited from you reading it.
defector	Supplied by a former member of the body it describes. Detailed, bitter, and shaped by the leaving.
inherited	Copied from an older tome or an older wiki by hands that did not understand it. Errors here are centuries deep.
⚠ warning	Reading, repeating or attempting this has hurt people. The entry is kept because hiding it has also hurt people.
synthetic?	Suspected of having been written by no one. Style without a source behind it. See The Pattern.

Use them like this:

It did not speak. {{R|firsthand|by=Nigel|date=1998}}
They are said to travel in threes. {{R|inherited}}
The programme ran until 1995. {{R|leaked|note=one document, no letterhead}}

Put the tag at the end of the claim. The reader should meet the claim first and the provenance second — the other order trains people to check the badge and skip the sentence.

Some specifics that come up:

unverified is not an insult

It is the resting state of nearly everything. Most of the wiki is unverified and always will be. Tagging something unverified is not a demand that someone go and prove it.

firsthand is not a promotion

It means one person says they were there. It is the tag most likely to be wrong in an interesting way, because the people who get close enough to have a firsthand account are, by then, not well.

contested is a duty

If you find an account that disagrees with what a page says, you do not get to choose between them. Tag it contested and write both into a Competing accounts section.

⚠ warning is about harm, not danger-as-flavour

It goes on material that has actually hurt someone who read it or tried it. If you use it for atmosphere it stops working, and it needs to work.

Competing accounts

When two sources disagree, the page keeps both. Use {{Account}}

under a == Competing accounts == heading and give each one a doubt — the strongest argument against it. Fill that in even for the account you believe. Especially then.

Do not resolve a contradiction by deleting half of it. Do not average two accounts into a vague third that nobody reported. If one account is much weaker, say why in its doubt field and leave it standing; a weak account that keeps recurring is data about something, even if it is only data about us.

Daemon is the worked example. Read its Competing accounts section and copy the shape.

Sourcing footers

Every reference entry ends with {{Sourcing}}

what it was drawn from, who assembled it, what is weakest about it, and what would improve it.

The doubt field is not optional in spirit. An entry that claims no weaknesses is filed under Category:Entries with no stated weaknesses, which is a queue of work, not a list of good pages.

The synthetic question

Some of what you read here was written by no one.

Text arrives that is fluent, confident, correctly formatted, and sourced to nothing that can be found afterwards. It agrees with the page it was added to. It is easier to read than the material around it. We have caught several of these and we assume we have missed more. contested

Where we suspect it, we tag it synthetic?

and leave the text in place rather than deleting it, because a deleted example teaches nobody what the pattern looks like. The Pattern sets out what we think is behind it, and why the method on this page may be the only thing protecting this wiki from becoming an instance of it: contradictions do not aggregate into a will. What we do not do is treat the tag as a verdict. We are frequently unable to tell, and accusing a member of being a machine because they write cleanly is its own kind of rot. See The Pattern.

This has a second edge, and new recruits should hear it from us rather than work it out: some entries on this wiki were drafted with machine assistance, openly, by people in this circle. The tag is not only a defence against an outside thing. It is also an honest label on our own tools. Whether that distinction survives contact with the thing itself is exactly what is being argued about.

What not to do

• Do not smooth the wiki out. Uneven registers, abrupt fragments and contradictions between pages are mostly signal. If you tidy them you delete the evidence that several different people with different reliability wrote this.
• Do not add certainty you do not have. Removing a hedge is an edit that changes a claim.
• Do not attempt a practice because you read about it here. Nothing under Category:Practices is instructional. Several of those entries are reconstructions from people who did not come back intact.
• Do not sign someone else's claim with your own handle, and do not leave a claim unsigned when you can sign it. The by field is the only accountability we have.
• Do not delete a fragment because it is short. Tag it {{Fragment}}

. Short and honest beats padded.

If you are editing for the first time

1. Find a claim you know something about.
2. Tag it, correctly, and nothing else. That is a complete and useful first edit.
3. Fill in a doubt field somewhere.
4. Only then write prose.

The apparatus — Template:R, Template:Account, Template:Sourcing, Template:Entity, Template:Fragment — is documented on its own pages. The tags themselves live in Module:Reliability; add one there and it appears in the legend on its own.