Contributing Expertise

Expertise is needed to review the historical research to ensure that it is accurate, has proper citations, and is complete. This means taking on the role of "reviewer" for factoid submissions.

This article covers the role of a reviewer.

What does contributing expertise mean?

Right now, the set of factoids is small (about 600 thousand) and it's generated by volunteers and by automated webcrawlers pulling information from websites such as Wikipedia, Google Earth, and the U.S. Government's World Factbook. As more factoids start coming in, more expertise will be needed to ensure that the baseline "Reality" timeline is of high quality. Help from history professionals will be greatly needed!

The idea of a baseline is that there are a set of "facts" that we generally understand to represent the past. These "facts" evolve over time with better interpretations of archeological evidence and other new discoveries. There is also a certain amount of uncertainty in each fact: say we know the year a city was founded but not the day; say we know a city was burned but we don't know who burned it. There are also alternative schools of thought on certain aspects of history which are both equally supported by today's still-sadly-too-thin evidence: early American settlement comes to mind. Helping identify which factoids belong in the baseline timelines and which in parallel timelines will be a delicate task.

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