Sources & Methodology

This page explains where the facts, images, and text on this site come from, and how a page moves from a first draft to something you can rely on. The short version: nothing here is invented. Every claim traces back to a real, cited source, and every page discloses how it was built.

Where the facts come from

Each entry starts from structured facts pulled via official, public APIs — never by scraping a website. The starting point is usually Wikidata (a structured, crowd-edited database) and the matching English Wikipedia article, both encyclopedic-tier sources used here as a first draft, not a final word. Per Editorial Standards, stronger sourcing — primary sources, scholarly work, and major cultural institutions like the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Schomburg Center — is preferred wherever a claim is contested or a page is ready to move past a first draft. Pre-colonial African societies specifically require scholarly sourcing, not just an encyclopedic summary, before a page is considered reviewed.

Where the images come from

Archival photographs come from the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Open Access, the New York Public Library, the National Archives, and Wikimedia Commons — again, only through their official APIs. Every image is checked for a clear public-domain, CC0, or otherwise commercially-usable license before it's attached to a page; if no rights-cleared image exists, the page publishes as text-only rather than using an image with unclear rights. No paid stock imagery is used, and no AI-generated images of real people, living or historical, appear anywhere on this site.

Where no rights-cleared photograph exists — often for pre-colonial subjects, or contemporary figures — you may instead see an original portrait or illustration by Corey Barksdale, clearly labeled as such. See Image & Artwork Credits for the full breakdown.

How the narrative text is written

Most page narratives on this site are AI-drafted: written strictly from the facts already gathered for that entry, plus background research from the cited Wikipedia extract, never from general knowledge or invention. Nothing is added that isn't traceable to a stored source URL on the page. Drafting this way lets the site cover a large number of entries with consistent sourcing discipline, but it is a first draft, not a substitute for a human reading the result against its sources.

The review pipeline

Every entry carries a status: draft, needs_review, or approved. A page only appears on the live site once it's approved, cites at least one source, and meets a minimum length — a mechanical floor, not a substitute for judgment. This site is under active, ongoing development, and the review process is continuous: pages you see marked as recently approved may still be revisited and refined as sourcing improves.

The Timeline is a little different

The Timeline page works differently from the rest of the site: most of its entries are reproduced close to verbatim from Wikipedia's own "Timeline of African-American history" article, rather than AI-drafted from scratch. A smaller set of earlier entries, covering pre-colonial African kingdoms, were hand-selected from individual Wikipedia articles and checked sentence by sentence against the source text. Either way, nothing on that page is invented, and every event links back to its source.

Something look wrong?

Tell us. See Contact & Corrections. Corrections are checked against sources before they're applied.