Terms of use

Reading is free and needs nothing from you

No account, no payment, no cookies, no tracking. You do not agree to anything by reading folkroom, and there is nothing here to accept. These terms bind us as much as you: they describe how the archive behaves.

The text is yours to reuse

Everything folkroom publishes is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. You may copy it, translate it, print it, build on it and sell what you build — provided you credit the source and release your version under the same licence. Copyright and reuse explains exactly how to attribute, and how to tell whether an image is covered by the same terms. It usually is not.

If you contribute, you keep your rights and grant us a licence

You keep the copyright in what you write. By submitting it you licence it to everyone under CC BY-SA 4.0, irrevocably, because an archive that could be partially withdrawn is not an archive. Your edits are public and attributed to your account.

Only submit what is yours to submit. Do not paste text from a book, a website or another encyclopedia. Read the source, then write what it says in your own words and cite it.

What we ask of you

• Cite what you claim. An uncited edit is not a contribution, it is a rumour.
• Do not publish knowledge a community has asked to keep closed. The community guidelines say more about why this matters more than anything else on the list.
• Do not use folkroom to promote a business, a troupe, a school or yourself.
• Do not attempt to degrade the service for other readers — scraping at a rate that costs other people their page load, probing for vulnerabilities, or circumventing rate limits. Reading the archive at human speed is always welcome, and there is a bulk route if you want the data properly.

What we may do

We may remove or amend anything that is uncited, copied, promotional, or that a community has asked us not to publish. We may restrict an account that repeatedly does those things. Every removal is recorded, and the transparency report counts them.

We may change these terms. Material changes are dated at the top of this page and announced on the record; we will not change them quietly.

What we do not promise

folkroom is provided as it is. We work hard on accuracy and we say plainly where we are uncertain — that is the whole design — but we cannot warrant that any entry is correct, current or complete, and you should not rely on it for anything that matters legally, medically or financially without checking the sources yourself. Every page lists them for exactly that reason.

We do not guarantee the site is always available. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss arising from your use of it.

Which law applies

folkroom is operated from India and these terms are governed by Indian law. Nothing here removes rights you hold under the consumer or data-protection law of the country you live in — where those give you more, they win.

Getting in touch

Questions about these terms, and everything else, go through contact. Copyright complaints have their own faster route on the copyright page.