Help

How to read folkroom, what its signals mean, and how to get the record out.

Last reviewed 27 August 2026

Reading a page

Every entry has the same shape. The condition sits under the title. The figures beneath it — first attested, practitioners, claims, sources — are counts of what is on record, not estimates. Where a figure reads unknown, no source we can cite has answered it.

Below that is the tradition itself, then how it got here, then the images, then every source the page draws on. Nothing on a page is unattributed.

What the signals mean

Colour is condition, never category. Where you see colour on a badge, a chart or a map, it reports how a tradition is doing — thriving, stable, fading, critical — and only where a source assessed it.
Stripes and dashes mean we do not know. An unassessed condition is never drawn as a solid colour, so it can never be mistaken for a fifth category.
A figure in a typewriter face has a source behind it. Counts, dates, tiers and identifiers are set that way across the whole site.
A shape marks what kind of thing a page is — a tradition, a place, a person, an instrument — and the word is always beside it.

Searching

Search tolerates misspelling, so manganiar finds Manganiyar. If nothing matches, the search offers to go and look: that queues the name for the next ingest run, which reads Wikidata and Wikipedia and composes a first draft. A draft is a starting point, not an answer, and it can never assess a condition.

Editions

The same archive, entered from where you are. An edition puts a country’s traditions and its calendar first without walling anything off — every page is reachable from every edition. See all editions.

Fixing something

Every page has an edit link, a talk page and a history. Your first edits queue for review; once they have held up they publish as you make them. Contribute explains the whole path, including what we cannot accept and why.

Getting the data in bulk

A public archive that can only be read one page at a time is not really public. Two routes, in order of preference:

The sitemap. /sitemap.xml indexes every published entry by type. Crawl politely — a request or two a second — and you have the archive.
Ask us. A database export is a better answer than a crawl for anyone doing research, and we would rather give you one than watch you scrape. Get in touch and say what you need it for.

Text is CC BY-SA 4.0; images are licensed individually and are not covered by it. Read copyright and reuse before you republish anything.

Accounts and privacy

Reading needs no account. Editing needs one so work can be credited to the person who did it. We store no cookies for readers and run no analytics. The privacy notice lists exactly what an account holds and how to delete it.