Weighing the Evidence: How This Site Checks Facts

A claim on Tailor, Weaver, Jeweler, Dyer should come with the means to check it: a museum record, a primary text, a technical analysis, or a calculation that can be done again. This page sets out the rules every page follows.

Statements that always carry a source

Some kinds of statement are never made without a source:

• dates and date ranges;
• who first used a technique, and when it first appears;
• materials and chemical composition;
• any identification of a particular object, which also names the museum and its accession number (the number a museum gives an object in its records);
• attributions to a named maker or firm;
• historical prices and costs, which also name the researcher, the year, what was priced or measured, and whether the figure comes from an experiment or a document;
• each "what the sources say" line on a page that tests a popular claim;
• statements about effects on the body, with bones, organs and injuries sourced separately.

A single experimental value is never scaled up into a general rule. The yield of a single laboratory extraction, for example, says nothing on its own about what a dye cost to make in the ancient world.

How each claim is known

A date or an attribution says what kind of evidence supports it: a museum's catalogue record, a technical analysis, or a judgement from style. Where the evidence is uncertain, the uncertainty stays in the text, in words such as probably or attributed to. Short answers, headings, captions and descriptions carry the same qualifiers as the text they summarize, so a summary is never more certain than the page.

When only the abstract of a paper was available, the source is marked as abstract only, and the page claims no more than the abstract says. A study known only from its bibliographic record is listed as a reference, and its conclusions are not stated as if they had been checked.

Where the evidence comes from

Facts about objects are checked against museum catalogue records, for example the open collection data published by the Rijksmuseum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Walters Art Museum and Wellcome Collection. Pigment analyses come from technical references such as ColourLex. Names, formulas and structures of dye molecules come from ChEBI, the chemical database run by EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute.

Primary texts include period cutting and sewing books, trade manuals such as Mark Campbell's on hairwork, and treatises on goldsmithing such as Benvenuto Cellini's, in public-domain editions.

Each source is used only as its own terms allow. Some can be quoted and tabulated. Others can only be cited for a single fact, with a link, and nothing from them is copied into the site's tables or files.

When sources disagree

Sources are ranked. Museum records and technical analyses come first, then scholarly books, then popular histories, and online encyclopedias last; an encyclopedia is a way to find sources, not one to cite. When two sources of the same rank disagree and the disagreement cannot be settled, the page gives both and says where they part.

Diagrams and figures that can be done again

Every weave diagram is drawn from the weave notation printed beside it, so anyone can redraw it from the same notation. Date bands and timelines are drawn from the same rows as the table next to them, and where a page offers a CSV file, it holds those rows, each with the source of its data. Sizes, weights and unit conversions are recalculated, not copied.

Recalculating checks the arithmetic and the drawing, not the input. If a source gives a wrong date, a correctly drawn date band repeats the wrong date, so each row still depends on its source being right.

Cross-sections of settings and garments follow how such things are generally built. They are not traced from a modern pattern book, a brand's design, a contemporary designer's jewelry drawing or a protected textile design; when a specific protected design matters, the page describes it in words instead.

Historical colors

A screen cannot show a dye. Every historical color on the site is labelled screen approximation and linked to a photograph of the real object, and a record of how each approximation was taken from its source image is kept on file.

Popular claims and origin stories

Stories about dress, such as where a pattern or a dye began or how corsets affected the body, are not repeated as fact until they have been set against primary sources. That works in both directions: a page does not start from the claim that corsets were harmful, or from the claim that they were harmless. Fractures, changes in bone shape, organ position and other harm are checked one at a time, and when the evidence for one of them is thin, the page says "evidence insufficient."

Images, one at a time

Each photograph and scan is checked on its own, for its license and for whether it shows what the caption says. A museum's open-access policy is a lead, not proof for any single image. A public-domain image states why it is public domain: the maker's death year and the jurisdictions where that applies, or the source's own Public Domain Mark or CC0 dedication. A photograph of a three-dimensional object, such as a ring or a corset, is credited under the photograph's own license, because a photograph can carry rights of its own even when the object is centuries old. If an image is cropped or labelled, its credit says so.

Some pages also carry scene-setting illustrations. They set a scene and are not evidence: no construction claim rests on them, and they never stand in for a surviving object, a period painting or a historical person. Each one carries this caption: "Illustration: Tailor, Weaver, Jeweler, Dyer. Generated schematic image — not a photograph or historical record. Reuse terms: may be shared with this full caption and a link to the source page; not licensed under CC BY."

Dangerous materials

Some historical processes used dangerous materials. When a page describes one, the warning sits in the same paragraph as the process, not in a note at the bottom of the page. The site gives no methods for tight-lacing or reducing the waist, no way to prepare or use lead, arsenic or mercury pigments, and no recipes or working steps for lye, reducing chemicals or mordants.

What every page shows

Every article lists its sources at the end, linked to the original wherever it can be reached. It shows the date it was published and the date of its last substantive revision, and it links to this page, to the corrections log and to the contact address.