Office of Continuity Verification
Historical Sourcing Policy
Plain language, no Bureau voice
The satire only works if the history is right. An artifact that gets a real date wrong stops being a joke about institutional certainty and becomes an example of it.
So every artifact on this site that leans on a real event carries a source note. You will find it near the bottom of the page, headed “Real-world source note.” It states the factual claim, the tier of sourcing behind it, a link where one exists, and a note marking what is fictional.
The three tiers
Every anchor is labelled with one.
Tier A, basic anchor. Dates and broad facts drawn from reputable museum, archive, government, university, or reference sources. Example: the Great Fire of London began in September 1666.
Tier B, specific detail. Names, quotations, document history, disputed claims, technical chronology. These need a primary source or an expert secondary source, and the note says which. Example: the wording and provenance of the 1844 telegraph message recorded on paper tape.
Tier C, sensitive event. War, atrocity, disaster, persecution, or contested public memory. These require deliberate sourcing and a separate sensitivity read before publication. Where we use one, the satire is aimed squarely at the institution’s indifference, never at the people harmed, and the artifact has to justify existing beyond shock.
For Tier C material we hold one additional rule: this site must not be the only context a reader receives for the event. The source note carries a real reference so a reader who arrived here first can go somewhere better.
What we will not do
- We do not invent a date, a name, a number, or an attribution and present it as fact. If we are unsure, the claim is written broadly enough to be safely true, or it is cut.
- We do not repeat a popular simplification as though it were established history. Where the real record is disputed or commonly misremembered, the Official Record entries say so plainly, and that honesty is usually funnier than the myth.
- We do not invent quotations for real people. See the policy on depictions of real historical persons.
- We do not fabricate a source URL. If we cannot name a source we are confident in, the anchor carries no link.
- We do not attach a fictional record to a real named institution. If an artifact needs a museum with a false accession record, the museum is fictional.
When we get it wrong
Real historical errors get corrected transparently and promptly, in plain language, outside the fiction. We never use the premise to dismiss a factual error as a change to the record. That would be the one joke this site is not allowed to make.
Raise it through correction requests.
Uncertainty is not a flaw
A good deal of history is genuinely unsettled, and the Bureau’s whole comic function is refusing to accept that. Where a real record is incomplete, disputed, or unknowable, we say so in the source note and let the Bureau be confident about it on the page above. The gap between those two registers is the entire joke.