The Method
How the work is done here

01 Codes and citation

Everything that matters here has a code, and every code is a live citation anywhere you write it.

Write SRC-0034 in a post, a comment, a verification note, a Brief or a contestation argument. No brackets, no button, no special syntax — the bare code is enough. It becomes highlighted, hoverable, and clickable: hovering shows the object's title, type and current status; clicking opens it.

The consequence is the whole point. A claim carries its evidence's standing with it at the moment of reading. If a source is contested next month, every argument that ever cited it says so, without anyone going back to edit anything.

The codes you will meet

02 The kinds of source

Seven kinds. The kind you choose decides which fields the source carries and — more importantly — which of the two verification paths it takes.

Everything also carries a date — free text, so 1971, March 1971 and 1968–1972 are all valid — an institution or author, and a language.

What is required when you submit

A title, a URL or an uploaded file, and a note saying what the document is and why it matters. Nothing else. Every other field can be completed later by anybody — an empty field is an invitation.

The cited passage

Optional, and worth more than it looks: transcribe the specific passage you are relying on. It appears as a quotation on the source page, and it turns "this document says X" into something a reader can check in five seconds instead of forty pages.

If the passage comes out of a document that is already in the archive, say so with “Quoted from” — that is a mechanic of its own, and §03b explains it.

Who can change what

03 Two paths to verification

This is the single most important mechanic on the platform, and the one newcomers most often get wrong: sources are not all established the same way.

The distinction is not about how good a source is. It is about what gets checked. On one path members check the document itself. On the other they check what it says. Two different questions, two different jobs.

What verification does not mean

It does not mean the document is telling the truth. Verification establishes that a document is authentic and is what it claims to be. Whether its contents are accurate, and what they imply, is argued in Chambers and synthesised — provisionally — in Briefs. Keeping these two questions apart is what keeps the archive usable by people who disagree with each other.

03b Quoting from a document already in the archive

Authenticating a document says nothing about what is inside it. This is how what is inside gets on the record.

Three members confirm that a court ruling is genuine and really is that ruling. Good. Now someone writes, in a Chamber, that the ruling acquitted the defendants. Nothing has established that. The confirmations were about the document, not about any sentence in it — and nobody is going to read four hundred pages to check a claim in passing.

So a passage gets its own source. You add a second source that contains just that passage, and link it to the document it came from with the field “Quoted from”. The two now sit at different levels and answer different questions:

Neither one covers both questions on its own. Together they do, and the link between them is visible from both pages — the passage says where it came from, and the work can be followed back to.

What belongs to which

The passage does not repeat the work's details. Author, publisher, date, reference number, DOI or ISBN all belong to the work, and appear on the passage's page under From the cited work, read-only, edited on the work's own page. If the work has a cover or an image, it is shown there too. There is one record of those facts, not two that can drift apart.

When not to use it

“Quoted from” means this source is an extract of that work. It does not mean “this source is about that work”, and the difference matters: an article reporting on a decree is not a piece of the decree. Linking them would print Quoted from on the page and simply be false.

For that reason the field does not appear at all on two kinds of source. On journalism, because an article is a whole work in its own right, not an extract of the thing it reports on. On audiovisual, because “which part” and “what is said there” are already answered on the source itself, by the timestamp and the transcript excerpt.

Quoting with an image

Transcribing is not always practical, and for a table or a chart it is not really possible. So you can photograph the page, or screenshot the file, and attach it: the image appears directly under the quotation, as the page it was read off.

Transcribing as well is strongly encouraged, and not required. A transcription can be searched, quoted into a Brief, and contested word by word; an image can only be looked at. A passage that exists only as pixels is invisible to everyone who is looking for it. For a table, transcribe the figures or the one claim you are relying on — that is the transcription, and it is enough.

Where the two are together they reinforce each other, and this is the quiet advantage: a member who does not own the book can still check that the transcription is faithful, because the page is right there. That is verification made possible by someone else's two minutes of effort.

04 Writing a verification note

A note is not an opinion about a document. It is a piece of evidence about a document.

A note needs two things:

The independence requirement sits on the references, not on the people. You may verify your own source. What makes a source hard to wave through is that three genuinely distinct pieces of corroborating evidence are hard to invent — not a rule about who is allowed to click.

Agreeing with a note

A note could only ever be contested or accepted in silence: objecting left a record, agreeing left nothing. So a page could show conflict and nothing else. Any member can now mark a verification note ◈ Agreed — you read the check and it holds — and the count sits on the note.

It counts for nothing in the arithmetic, and that is the point. Verification is still three argued notes with distinct references; agreements never move a source toward ✓ Verified. Writing a note means having done the work, agreeing means being convinced by someone else's, and a hundred agreements on one note would still be one check. If agreement counted, verification would become a vote.

The other path: a Brief

A Brief corroborates every source it cites. It is much heavier than writing a short note, and correspondingly more robust — and the relationship is two-way, so a source page shows which Briefs rest on it. See section 11.

05 The statuses

Every source carries one, everywhere it is cited.

The ratio of contesters to defenders is always visible — ⚑ 3 · ◈ 5 — so nobody has to take the status on faith.

Deleting what you submitted

You can delete your own source, and your own proposal, only while nobody else has touched it. Not "until it is verified": one verification note is already somebody's work, and a source under contestation must not be removable by the person being questioned. So the rule is the plain one — no notes, no confirmations, no contestation, no replies, and not cited anywhere.

This is for the mistake: submitted twice, wrong link, wrong chamber. Once a source is cited in a Brief, in a discussion, or as the reference of somebody else's verification note, it stays — deleting it would leave a footnote pointing at nothing. A proposal that has been migrated is never deletable either: it is the reason something is in the graph.

06 Contestation

There is no moderator who decides whether a document is genuine. There is a procedure, it runs in public, and it has an explicit rule for how it ends.

Three kinds, for three different objects.

Contesting a whole source — CONT-

One contester moves the source to In Review at once. Three make it Contested. It resolves as Dismissed when defenders outnumber contesters — the contesters do not have to withdraw, and nobody has to concede. Only one whole-source contestation can be open at a time: someone with a different objection joins the existing one rather than starting a parallel fight. The uploader cannot contest their own source. Anyone can withdraw their position at any point, and the counts recalculate.

Contesting a single note — CONTN-

Only on non-primary sources: a primary source has nothing to argue about note by note. You cannot contest your own note, and a note carries only one open contestation at a time. While it is open the contested note stops counting toward the threshold, so the source may drop a status — from Verified back to In Review, for instance.

This one does not resolve by majority, and that is the deliberate difference from the other two. Members can join it or defend the note, and every position is recorded publicly — but no ratio of contesters to defenders ends it. A contestation of a whole source is a judgement about a document's standing, and counting people is a reasonable way to settle it. A contestation of a single note is an objection to one specific check: you say you cross-referenced this archive, but that archive does not cover that year. Ten members saying otherwise does not make the objection false. So the count is evidence for whoever has to decide, not the decision.

There are exactly two ways it ends.

The replacement is the reason a single abandoned contestation cannot freeze a source forever. Only the contester can withdraw, and a contester who never comes back would otherwise leave the note dead and the source stuck below its threshold, with nothing anyone could do. Answering with work rather than with a show of hands is the way out — and it is the one exception to the rule that you write one verification note per source: your contested note no longer counts, so the replacement puts you back at one valid note, never two.

If the replacement does not really answer the objection, it can be contested in turn. Each round costs the author real work and the contester a real argument, which is the only pressure the system applies.

The contested note is never removed, and stays marked as contested even after the contestation closes. It remains visible as part of the record. Being shown to be wrong is history, not something to erase.

Contesting a graph connection — CONTG-

Same majority mechanism. A connection under contestation is drawn differently in the graph, and its panel links to the contestation. It does not reach back and reopen the proposal that created it: that proposal stays Merged. The history is frozen; the dispute is about the claim as it stands now.

07 Chambers and strands

Chambers are where the work happens. The archive and the graphs are where the results live.

A Chamber is a persistent community around a subject, divided into strands — threads of enquiry. A Chamber on the Cold War might carry strands for CIA & Covert Ops, the Nuclear Race, Proxy Wars, Propaganda. Every post, source and proposal can be attached to a strand, which is what keeps a busy Chamber navigable a year later.

Any member can open one and becomes its first moderator, and can invite others to moderate. Moderation is housekeeping — structure, strands, tidiness. Moderators do not decide what is true, and have no power in any contestation.

A source submitted inside a Chamber belongs to the whole platform immediately. Chambers produce; they do not own.

The Keep

Every strand has a tab called The Keep: the state of things inside it, answering the question of anyone who arrives — where are we? Nobody writes it and it interprets nothing. It puts in order what the platform already knows, and recalculates itself. The header of the strand sums it up in one line: 9 standing · 3 disputed · 6 open ground.

Every entry says why it is where it is — SRC-0040 · authenticated 3/3 · no open contestations — so nobody has to take the panel's word for it. Briefs stay out: they are readings, not facts. A connection belongs to a strand when at least one source of that strand supports it, which is how a connection from one investigation does not appear in another. Tracing a strand means following its Keep: see Traces.

08 Proposing something to a graph

Nobody writes into the shared maps alone, and nobody needs permission from an authority. The gate is three people willing to put their reasoning on the record.

Revising something already in the map

You do not edit it. You propose a new connection that supersedes the old one, and the old one remains queryable as history. In Pyramid this is explicit: every ownership stake is stated "as of" a date, and a slider moves the whole graph back in time.

09 Direct or structural

The least obvious choice on the platform, and the one that decides how much work your endorsers have to do.

When you propose a connection you must say which of the two it is. The question is simple: does the source state this connection, or do you infer it?

The asymmetry is deliberate. Structural claims are where a graph can quietly fill with plausible-sounding assertions, so the cost of endorsing one is higher: three people must each write down, in public, exactly how they got there. If they cannot, the connection does not migrate.

10 The three graphs

Three maps of the same world. Choosing the right one is mostly a matter of which question you are answering.

All three share the same machinery: codes, citation, contestation of connections, the proposal pipeline, entity pages, search, embedding in Briefs, and a working sub-view inside every Chamber.

11 Briefs

Where a line of enquiry ends — for now.

A Brief is a short documented argument. The name carries both senses: a brief document, and a brief argued in front of a court. It is not an encyclopaedia entry and not a summary of everything known: it is a mini-thesis about connections found inside one strand.

Publication requires at least two contributors. That is structural, not decorative: a Brief is meant to be something more than one person's essay. Paragraphs carry per-author attribution, citations become footnotes automatically — naming a graph node or a specific connection between two, not only a source — and a Brief can embed graph connections inline, drawn in the visual language of their graph.

Every Brief opens with a thesis: a first section, fixed in place, that states in the author's own words what the Brief argues. It cannot be renamed, reordered or removed once the Brief exists — an endorsement, or a rival Brief written in disagreement, answers this section specifically, not an average of whatever comes after it. A Brief cannot publish without one, alongside a title, its minimum of contributors, and at least one cited source.

Briefs are not contested

They receive endorsements — a count, conferring nothing. If you disagree with a reading of the evidence, the answer is another reading: write your own Brief, or open a Chamber. Contestation is a procedure for documents, and an interpretation is not that kind of claim.

12 Grades, invites, contributions

A record of work done. Nothing more — grades confer no powers at all.

One currency: contributions. Building the graphs counts exactly like filling the archive — writing your case for a connection, or examining someone else's and putting your name behind it, is the same kind of work as submitting a document.

Withdrawing an endorsement takes the contribution back, and so does leaving a contestation you had joined. Only your first objection on a given proposal counts. Otherwise endorsing and un-endorsing in a loop, or joining and leaving the same contestation, would be a way of earning nothing while appearing to work.

Endorsing a Brief, migrating an approved proposal and writing a post do not count. They are either too cheap to be evidence of work, or a step whose real effort was already counted when the proposal was made and argued.

Your name

Your username is your signature. It appears on every source you submit, every verification note you write, every objection you raise — there is no separate display name, and nothing you can set that shows up in place of it. A record of work is worth something only if it is attached to somebody, and the same name has to mean the same person in the archive, in a contestation, and on a Brief.

You can change it once. Nobody chooses a name carefully in the thirty seconds it takes to accept an invitation, and a signature lasts longer than that; so there is one way out, and after it the name is permanent. When you change it, everything you have already signed shows the new name — the record stays whole, it does not split in two.

The name you leave behind is retired, not released: nobody else can ever register it. Otherwise a name could be worn, abandoned, and picked up by a stranger who would inherit, in the eyes of anyone reading, everything the first person had signed. Links to your old name keep working and lead to you.

Invites

Three when you arrive, one more for every ten contributions, and one on first reaching Wanderer, Freeman, Notary, Alderman and Chronicler. Each code works once.

Who invited whom is recorded and shown on both pages. Inviting is an act with your name on it — and since there is no moderator to correct the community's drift, who gets in is the only real quality control the platform has.

13 What rises to the top

Nothing on Cittadelle is promoted editorially. Three mechanisms decide what you meet first, and each of them is arithmetic you can check against what is on the page.

None of them touches a source's status. Attention is not verification: a post everyone is arguing about is not closer to being true than one nobody has read, and the marks below say only that people are there — never that they are right.

◆ Voices rising

A post is marked rising when it is less than 48 hours old and has drawn at least one and a half times the platform's average number of replies — never fewer than two, however quiet the platform is.

The threshold is relative on purpose. A fixed number would mean "busy" on a young platform and nothing at all on a crowded one; measured against Cittadelle's own average, the mark means the same thing in both. The same rule marks a Chamber on the Chambers page, counting posts in the last 48 hours instead of replies to one post.

Word from the Walls

The most discussed posts of the last seven days, across the whole platform — not only the Chambers you have joined. It appears at the top of your feed and has a tab of its own.

It counts replies written in those seven days, not posts opened in them. The difference matters: an argument from last year that starts again today belongs here, and a ranking by total replies would instead freeze — after enough history the same four posts would sit at the top permanently, describing the past while claiming to describe now.

The Pulse

A page of its own, in the sidebar. Where the rest of the platform shows you what exists, The Pulse shows you where the Cittadella is currently dividing — who has taken a side, and which side. Five sections:

Every count is taken inside a window, and you choose the window — this week, this month, or since the beginning — for the whole page at once. A section with nothing in it hides rather than showing you an empty frame, and if every section is empty the page says so and falls back to what has most recently arrived.

14 ∴ Traces

The things you follow, what moved around them while you were away, and how they hold together. The one page on Cittadelle that belongs to you alone: nobody else can see it.

An investigation is a web of sources, contestations, entities and Briefs that need watching together. Until now that web lived in each member's head, or in a file of their own. Traces keeps it on the platform. Press ∴ Trace, next to Share, on anything you want to follow, and it joins ∴ Traces in your sidebar, with everything that moves around it from then on.

What you can trace

A node of a graph is traced through its entity page, so the same actor is followed once across all three maps. Chambers are not traced: joining one already follows it. A draft Brief can be traced only by its co-authors.

Tracing, and the one public number

Every tap on Trace asks for confirmation and says what will reach you; so does stopping, because on a phone a mistaken tap should not lose a trace. You can choose up to 500 traces.

Every object you can trace shows Traced by 12 — on a computer in its information panel, on a phone as the number inside the round ∴ button, gold when one of the twelve is you. It is a count, never a list of names. Guests see the number but cannot trace.

Since you were last here

The first tab, Changes, opens on what moved since your last visit, newest first. Below it, under Earlier, are the changes of the last thirty days you have already seen, so reloading the page loses nothing. A gold dot beside ∴ Traces in the sidebar says something new is waiting.

A change can reach you through something you trace without being about it: a contestation opened on a source you trace, a new question in a strand you trace. The row says so — via SRC-0040. Four new replies to a post arrive as one row, 4 new replies, and repeated mentions in the same place are gathered the same way. What you did yourself never appears, and nothing from before you began tracing is carried in.

Your traces

The second tab lists what you trace, grouped by kind — strands, sources, entities, contestations, proposals, Briefs, posts — and filtered by kind or by Chamber. Each row carries its current state and the reason for it, in the manner of The Keep: 0/3 verification notes · 1 contested, question · 5 replies · answered. Under each row, how it is linked to your other traces: ↳ cited in BRF-0007 · used to verify SRC-0045. Something that has been deleted stays in the list, marked no longer exists, until you stop tracing it.

Links you did not know about

The third tab, Links, shows what no single page can. Worth tracing lists things you do not trace that are linked to at least two of your traces, each with the reason — cited in BRF-0007 · used to verify SRC-0045. They point at what is central to your investigation without anyone having to say so. Trace one from there, or Hide it: a hidden suggestion comes back on its own if more of your traces link to it.

Tracing a strand does not turn everything in it into a suggestion — its changes already reach you through the strand. The reverse does happen: several things you trace in the same strand suggest the strand. Drafts are never suggested, and neither is anything in The Masons' Yard. Below the suggestions, Between your traces shows how the things you already follow point to one another.

Nothing here is guessed. Links are read from what the platform already records: a contestation and what it contests, a Brief and what it cites, a proposal and its evidence, an extract and the document it quotes, a verification note and the source it relies on, a graph connection and the entities it joins, a post and the sources attached to it, a code written by hand in public text. When two things are linked in several ways the strongest link is shown, and a bare mention only where nothing else links them.

Path, the map

The fourth tab draws all of it as a single map. Each label carries a code and a short title — from far away, the code alone — and strands are drawn as zones around what they contain. Three switches turn the layers on and off: Changes marks with a gold dot what has moved since your visit; Links draws the lines between your traces, red for a contestation; Worth tracing adds the suggestions as dashed labels, joined by dotted lines to the traces that suggest them.

Labels keep their distance and never cover the name of a zone. Drag one and it stays where you put it; the whole map is remembered as you leave it, and Reset layout lets it arrange itself again. Tap a label for its panel: its state, what is new, its history, its links, and the same controls as the list — how much reaches you, your note, and Trace or Hide for a suggestion.

How much reaches you

Each trace has a level, set from the ∴ button on its row or from its panel on Path.

Changes of state are: a source verified, authenticated or contested; a contestation opened or closed; a proposal reaching or losing its threshold, or migrating; a Brief published; a question answered, or its answer removed; something new in a strand; something deleted. Activity is everything else: notes, authentications still short of the threshold, people joining or leaving a contestation, endorsements, objections, evidence added, citations, mentions, replies.

When the same change reaches you through two traces with different levels, the more open one wins. At the bottom of Changes a line says how many changes your levels are holding back.

Codes written by hand

A code written into public text tells the people who trace it where it was written: Mentioned in a reply to POST-0043, … in the thread of PROP-0024, … in a verification note on SRC-0049. That covers posts and their replies, the discussion of a source, the threads of proposals and contestations, the case made for a proposal, objections, endorsements, the arguments of a contestation and of those who join it, verification notes, and the descriptions of sources, strands and entities.

Private messages never do it, and neither do drafts; a draft Brief or a deleted post named in a text is not recorded at all. A code repeated in the same message counts once, and so does a code you remove and write again. One message sends at most twenty of these signals, for the first codes written; the others still link. Editing a message counts only the codes you added, and the ones you removed stop linking. A source attached with the button and also written in the text gets its Cited in, not a second signal. The Masons' Yard is where members report problems with the site itself, so codes written there notify no one: a bug report that names a source is about the page, not the document.

What you create

What you create is traced for you — a source you add, a contestation you open, a proposal, a Brief, a question or a discussion — marked automatic and set to Status only, so you learn when your source is contested without hearing about every note. Automatic traces do not count toward your 500, and they are never part of a Traced by count. Stop one like any other; tracing it again by hand makes it an ordinary trace, at All. To stop them altogether, turn off Trace what I create in Settings → Notifications; the ones already there stay until you remove them.

Your note

Any trace can carry a private note of up to 500 characters — why you follow it, what to watch for. It sits under the row in your list and in the trace's panel on Path, and only you can read it.