Reader’s Guide to EarthChronicle.com

Everything on our website is Public Domain

This is so easy it's short. Everything you see here at our website is Public Domain. Text, HTML code, images, sounds, and other files of any kind, ideas, categories, terminology, facts, classifications, etc., etc. If it's on our website find it, learn it, use it. There's no charge to use any of it, and you never have to ask anyone's permission. EarthChronicle.com is dedicated to the amazing legacy that is our birthright after 10,000 years of civilization. If you had to ask permission, we wouldn't have put it on the internet, the world's most powerful tool for sharing information. This site is THAT simple.

References: Standard, Factual, and Image

One of the key goals of EarthChronicle.com is to preserve human knowledge and its rich history. While we prefer well-written articles in plain language, the research requirements for our articles are actually much more stringent than any scholarly journal that I am aware of. This is partly because our material is all Public Domain. A college professor will be handsomely reimbursed selling hundreds or thousands of copies of a $50 textbook, whereas all of our contributors agree to make these articles available to you free; it is therefore not only sensible, but morally right to make sure the authors are properly credited for their work. We do therefore ask that as you take advantage of our rich sources of information, that you keep the references together with the information. That’s why we’ve done the hard work of keeping all the references together with the information to make it easy for you to copy everything together.

There is also a second reason, we are interested in the history of ideas (and facts), not just the ideas themselves, so while a scholarly journal only wants to make sure that someone is recognized for their discoveries, we want to track the history of facts as well. In scholarly articles, facts are typically not cited at all. If you browse some of our articles you will see why this can be such a tall order sometimes. It is almost impossible for an individual writing a paper to do research that thoroughly. However, EarthChronicle.com is not an individual and we are not limited by deadlines. It is no problem for us if it requires hundreds of people, years of time, and the creation of dozens of other articles to appropriately flesh out the full history of the ideas and facts in an article. We don’t expect our articles to be thoroughly researched quickly, or under the guidance of a few people. That’s why we ask you to share any information that you have; it is our team effort that brings this site alive and makes it tick. Therefore, we have several different kinds of references, some of which you may not have seen before:

Standard:

This is the type of reference you are familiar with. When you wrote a paper for school and made a bibliography or works cited, you had to credit each IDEA that you borrowed from someone else’s work. If you wrote a research paper, you’ve had to do this… a lot. Standard references credit someone else for their ideas. We include standard references immediately after the idea. Though this disrupts the flow of the text a little, it makes it effortless to copy both idea and reference together so that credit goes where credit is due.

Factual:

So far as I know, this is entirely our own creation. Since EarthChronicle.com traces the history of ideas and facts, we recognize that even facts can change over time. Columbus discovered America in 1492… except that Viking explorers had beat him to it by several hundred years… except that the Americas were settled by groups now collectively known as Native Americans around 14,000BC… and this too will change the next time scholars uncover new evidence transforming our understanding of the history of the Americas. Therefore we consider it important to trace who originated not just an idea, but a FACT. And we want to trace how these facts develop and change; politicians in particular are notorious for twisting facts to suit their political needs. How Nazi Germany twisted facts about Jewish history and biology is one of the most horrific examples of this kind of factual manipulation, but all governments and individuals do it for various reasons and with various results. If nothing else, we each have our own point of view that colors what we think about an idea or why it's important. That’s why the history of a fact can sometimes be more important, and more interesting than the fact itself, and we want to chronicle these histories as well. To avoid disrupting the flow of text, facts and their histories aren't cited in the text, only on our special Bibliographic Foundation Pages (BFPs) with their attached histories. In our webpages we simply provide a superscript F^F that links to the appropriate BFP.

Image:

This may be familiar to you. Newspapers usually credit a photographer or news organization for the photographs that appear in its pages. There is usually a by-line under most newspaper pictures that’s exactly the same as appears under each article title. These may be a little short, but they are the same idea as our image references. We provide full formal reference for each image that appears on our web pages, just like we do for each idea and fact. This includes all images, photos, headings, backgrounds, thumbnails, etc. If it’s on our website the filename of the image will appear in our Image Index page with a full citation. We also attempt to include the image policy in writing of the person or organization that created the image so that the Image Credits can unequivocally show the image is Public Domain.

Dates

Despite our best efforts to be clear, authoritative, and non-controversial, there are some issues you can't escape. We certainly will never shrink from hard decisions about including information on harsh topics like, Nazism, slavery, etc. With all these incredibly hot-button issues to choose from it may seem ironic that the first controversial position we have to take is on the format of dates. There are two equal and opposite dating conventions current on the internet, US and European. The US convention is to list Month Day, Year. (Thus, January 30, 2005 or 1/30/05.) This has the advantage that it is probably the most common form on the internet today. The European convention is to list Day Month Year. (Thus, 30 January 2005 or 30/1/05.) This has the advantage that units go from smallest to largest, a much more logical order. It is also the one used by the MLA style manual, which is the basis of our reference format.

So which have we used... *sigh* sadly neither. We believe that both of these date conventions are ultimately on the way out because of the computer and the internet. Neither of these schemes alphabetize in chronological order, we are among a small group that is moving to this new Alphabetical convention. Just one example is that when EarthChronicle.com receives a webpage with the name, Name.html, we save it with an extra date tag so that it is readily apparent when it was received, say January 30th, Name20050130.html. Every time there is a major revision, we save a new copy with the current date. The only way to name any document so that a computer will alphabetize the documents in chronological order is to enter the units from largest to smallest. We believe this new computer mandated style will ultimately force people to change in the same way that it has compelled us at EarthChronicle.com. So we are among the growing ranks of those who use this computer-mandated Alphabetical convention. This is, in fact, the ONLY break we make in our references from MLA style. (OK... the only deliberate break.)

BC vs. BCE; Why don't we use the Common Era?

For those of you familiar with the Common Era system, you may or may not be happy to see that we don’t use it. Basically, we don't think it will survive; it hasn't done a good job of catching on. If you’re unfamiliar, the Common Era is uncomfortable with the religious connotation of the BC (Before Christ)/AD (Anno Domini “Year of the Lord”) calendar count. I think that’s a very dubious reason to attempt such a major change. Whether you are religious or not, there's certainly no denying religion has been an institution of major cultural importance in the history of civilization. It's no coincidence that the only serious alternative to BC/AD is the Muslim calendar, which is also religious.) Moreover, in a self-defeating attempt to win converts, the Common Era makes it "easy" to change by preserving the traditional numbering of years (i.e. 1BC becomes 1BCE, 10BC becomes 10BCE, 100AD becomes 100CE, etc.) Thus, subtlely or not, it preserves Christ’s birth as the defining moment in history. Which completely undermines the entire purpose of the change. So... why were we supposed to go through all this trouble again??

Link Warnings

If we do anything on a webpage that could cause problems, we note it in parentheses immediately after the link. That way you don't have to click on it to find out what's on the other side. For the same reason, we try to ensure that all links are descriptive so you know the topic or function of the page before you link to it. Descriptive links are also important for visitors using text browsers and the visually impaired as the link lists are impossible to use functionally. The most common warning is the size of image files on an image page so you can decide if you want to wait for the image to download or not. However, the size of large pages, complicated programming that doesn't display properly on some browsers, or special features that could crash a computer are also warnings we use to make your visit less frustrating and more enjoyable.

ECAN Subject Codes

First there were the Dewey Decimal codes you learned in school. (technically the Dewey Decimal Classification [DDC]) Then when you went to college you may or may not have been subjected to the Library of Congress (LC) call numbers. So why, oh why, OH WHY is there a completely new one here!?

I swear this was not meant to aggravate anyone. There are literally dozens of different highly respected subject classification systems used by libraries around the world. However, DDC and LC are far and away the most common now used. The LC system was inappropriate because it is specialized. It was meant to be collection specific and no one intended or designed it to work for any library except the Library of Congress. Add to that, it's also quite difficult to use. Most people have never seen it, and the alpha-numeric codes (a combination of letters and numbers) have no obvious connection to the subjects they stand for. (For example, encyclopedias are coded, AE, while dictionaries are coded, AG.) You can get used to it, if you use if for awhile, say during four years of college. However, someone dropping by a website might as well try reading a foreign language.

The DDC is also difficult to use. The subject, science, and its Dewey call number 500, have no connection to each other. However, many people have been abused by it and can pick it up again fairly quickly. Dewey call numbers are the obvious choice to use at EarthChronicle.com... so why didn't we? It's a good question that has a shocking answer. The Dewey Decimal Classification is copyrighted. That's right. This is one of the poster children for what is horribly wrong with the international copyright system. A brilliant man who was born in the 1800s and dedicated his life to libraries and the spread of information, Melville Dewey, created the world's most important classification scheme. And you will be sued if you try to use it.

Everything on EarthChronicle.com is Public Domain. This is not a matter of pride, though we are proud of it. It is perhaps our most important policy which allows all our visitors to KNOW that they can actually use any text, images, HTML, etc., AND MOST IMPORTANTLY IDEAS without having to ask someone's permission. Does it make sense to tell you to use anything EXCEPT our classification system? Obviously not. Who would even think to check that it was copyrighted? We didn't. We were looking for a detailed explanation of the DDC, only to run across the OCLC homepage trumpeting that any website must first apply to them for permission to use the DDC. (The OCLC is one of the most important international library organizations.) A quick search turned up a number of cases that were settled amicably but proved that OCLC aggressively defends its right to license the DDC. So we're stuck creating our own system. *grumble* *grumble*

The EarthChronicle Alpha-Numeric (ECAN) Subject Code is our best solution. It is an Alpha-numeric code which means it uses both letters and numbers. To facilitate ease of use, we try to abbreviate the subject or use its initials, e.g. F is the code for Fiction, so you have some hope of knowing what it is. As much as possible we try to have everything clearly labeled so that first time users have no difficulty using it. And it is Public Domain, like everything else here. So if you need it or want to use if for your website, GREAT! It's yours! Do what you need to do. Adapt it all you want, though if you do too good a job, we very well might want to borrow your changes. :)

I'm hoping this will work like the w3.org's specification for HTML, as I understand it. While you can change or develop ECAN on your own, everyone agrees it would be nice if ten years from now we can all still understand one another's systems. So if as you adapt ECAN for your own use, let us know what your changes and ideas are. We'll keep a master specification for the ECAN classification that you can reference, but more importantly it will serve as a basis to keep us all in the same ballpark.