The Grading System
Honesty made checkable. Every claim on the site wears its certainty in a plain word, so the reader can audit the argument as they read it.
The convention
Three words do the work. Documented marks a claim that rests on a primary source named on the page. Possible marks one that is plausible and sourced but not settled — held open rather than asserted. Apocryphal marks a claim that is repeated in the literature but could not be confirmed, and so is reported, not relied on. The word is derived at build time from the project’s own sourcing checks and shown beside the claim; the reader never has to take the argument’s strength on trust, because the strength is on the page.
Why it is load-bearing
A study that files its weak claims and its strong ones under the same confident tone can smuggle the weak past the reader on the momentum of the strong. Marking each claim at its real weight makes that impossible from the inside: an over-reach shows up as a word that does not match its evidence. The grading is therefore not decoration on the argument but a working part of it — the argument carries its own audit.
Role in the thesis
The convention that lets the whole hold together honestly: the reader can check any claim against its own mark, and the project can be caught by its own standard wherever it fails to meet it.
Referenced by. Where this entry is cited in the reading — hover any to read it in place.