The five grades
A grade is not an opinion about a claim. It is a statement about what the primary record — the document, the official table, the filed record — does to the claim. Later summaries, however confident, do not move a grade; only the record does.
- ProvenA contemporaneous primary record establishes it.
- DocumentedA credible official record exists; interpretation stays open.
- UnprovenTestimony or claim only; nothing corroborating has surfaced.
- MisidentifiedReal, but attached to the wrong thing, date, place, or person.
- FabricatedA proven hoax, forgery, or false claim.
The lab grades its own theories on the same scale, and files them as hypotheses — Unproven until the record says otherwise. A desk that cannot source a claim does not publish the claim.
How a status is decided
A line's status on this hub is its true public state, checked against the live site and the lab's own record:
- Live — the site or product is serving now, verified by opening it.
- Going live soon — the build is public and the launch is in motion; no date is shown until the founder announces one.
- In the lab — research is underway and there is no public site yet.
- In development — a product is being built; it gets a link the day it serves.
- Held — paused by the founder. The page says so, and nothing about it is dressed up.
Sub-labels say the quiet part out loud: an archive is a finished body of research that stays readable; an imprint is a publishing house whose titles carry their own pages. A line whose state cannot be verified is withheld from the hub until it can be — being absent is more honest than being wrong.
Receipts, or it did not happen
Every number on this site links to its receipt: what was counted, from which source, at what time. Counts are produced by programs, refreshed on a schedule, and hidden when a source cannot support them. That rule has no exceptions for good news: a figure that flatters the lab is held to exactly the standard of one that does not.