How this site is verified

The rule

A claim stays on this site if it traces to a source, and the source says what the page says it says. Not what the textbook version says. Not what everyone repeats. What the paper says.

That standard is checked one paper at a time: find the paper, read what it actually claims, check the claim on every page that cites it, and attach the paper's URL to the citation. A citation with a direct link (marked "Read the paper") has been through that process. A citation without one hasn't yet. The build system counts both, so progress is measurable rather than claimed.

Why this matters here

Checking has consequences. It has already changed this site. The scaling-laws entry deleted a widely-repeated explanation after a 2024 paper refuted it. The prompt-engineering entry corrected a "first" that the cited paper's own text contradicts. The word2vec entry dropped the famous doctor-nurse analogy after the paper showing it's an artifact of how the demo excludes answers. Each of those corrections is logged, publicly, on the corrections page.

The pattern across every error found so far: the mistake is never the number and never the definition. It is the story — who did something first, what caused what. So verification here prioritises exactly those claims.

Edited, not crowdsourced

Artifipedia has one editor. That is a limitation and a position. Nothing is published by consensus, nothing is written by committee, and when something is wrong there is exactly one person responsible for fixing it. Wikis distribute trust across contributors; this site concentrates it into a method you can audit — the sources are listed, linked where verified, and the corrections are public.

Years, titles, and the arXiv problem

Citations here use the published year and venue, not the preprint year. A paper posted to arXiv in 2020 and published at ICLR in 2021 is cited as 2021. Fifteen citations on this site were silently wrong about this before the rule was enforced; all are fixed and the class of error is checked mechanically on every build.

What this doesn't guarantee

Honesty about limits is part of the method. Verification against a paper cannot catch a claim the field itself later overturns — one explanation cited here stood for four years before being refuted, and was corrected only when the refutation was found. Some claims have no correction paper to find. And roughly one paper in six has been through the full process so far; the rest carry their sources unlinked, which is the visible mark of not-yet-checked. The count on this page's build output is the honest state, and it moves.

Report an error

If something here is wrong, say so. Substantive corrections are logged publicly with what changed and why. Being corrected is the method working, not failing.