Governance

Who runs it

folkroom is small and independent. It is not a foundation, not a company with investors, and not a project of any institution. Nobody has bought influence over what it records, because there has been nothing to buy.

This is worth saying plainly rather than implying scale we do not have. A reader deciding whether to trust an archive is entitled to know how many people stand behind it.

How permissions work

One ladder, and it governs how much review your work needs rather than whether you may contribute at all. Nobody is refused the ability to submit.

• Volunteer — everyone starts here. Edits queue for review.
• Contributor — edits publish immediately on ordinary pages. Given once a few edits have held up.
• Author — edits publish everywhere, and can review other people’s.
• Editor — reviews what the machine proposes, protects pages under dispute, rolls back damage.
• Admin — grants tiers, and can suspend an account.

Promotion follows sustained good work, not tenure. Every grant, every removal and every moderation action is written to an audit log with who did it and why.

What the machines decide, and what they do not

A pipeline reads Wikidata and Wikipedia and composes drafts. It runs on a schedule with no one watching, so its limits are set in code rather than in intention:

• It can never assess a condition. Thriving, fading, critical — those come from a person reading a source and saying so. The machine can say a tradition exists and where it is practised; it is not permitted to guess how it is doing.
• Everything it proposes routes to a human reviewer, at Editor level or above, because a single tertiary source is low confidence by construction.
• Six checks run before anything publishes — provenance, concept, citation, licence, substance, decency — and again on a schedule afterwards. A page that fails the last of those is pulled down rather than queued.

How disagreements are settled

By sources, not by seniority. Where two good sources disagree, folkroom records both and says they disagree — it does not adjudicate. An editor’s tier lets them act faster; it does not make them right, and it is not a tiebreak.

Where a practitioner and a published source disagree, that is not a tie to break either. It is a gap in the record, and it gets recorded as one.

How it is funded

Out of pocket, at present. No advertising, no sponsorship, no paid placement, and no arrangement under which anyone can pay to appear or to be described differently. If that changes — a grant, a donation, an institutional partner — it will be named on this page before it takes effect, along with what it does and does not buy.

Free forever is not a promotional line. There is no paywall planned, no account required to read, and no tier of the archive held back.

Transparency

What gets counted, and published here as the numbers accumulate: pages removed and why, copyright complaints received and their outcomes, community requests to withdraw material, accounts restricted, and decisions reversed on appeal. Reversals are counted beside the actions rather than quietly dropped, because a report that only counts what we got right is not a transparency report.

If folkroom stops

The single most important commitment on this page, and the one most archives never make.

Everything folkroom publishes is CC BY-SA 4.0 and is already mirrored in the sitemap, so the record can be taken and republished by anyone at any time, without asking. If the project ends, the intent is to place a full export with an institution that keeps such things, and to say so publicly before shutting anything down rather than after.

An archive whose survival depends on one person’s continued attention is not an archive. Help explains how to take a copy today.