The Name 100 Women Project maintains rigorous fact-checking protocols, academic verification pipelines, and transparent curation practices. These Editorial Guidelines establish the standards governing our interactive trivia database, historical profiles, and educational essays.
1. Editorial Independence & Commercial Separation
Our editorial decisions operate with strict independence:
- Commercial Firewalls: Advertisers participating in the Google AdSense network have zero authority or input regarding historical inclusions, biographical wording, or quiz mechanics.
- No Sponsored Inclusions: Entry into the 100 Women Master Roster cannot be purchased, sponsored, or influenced by commercial PR campaigns or political organizations.
- Impartial Historicism: We evaluate historical impact through durable cultural, scientific, and geopolitical evidence rather than fleeting viral trends.
2. Multi-Tiered Verification & Primary Sources
Every biographical capsule, date range, and milestone is vetted through reputable academic and institutional archives:
| Research Tier | Institutional Repositories | Verification Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1: Primary Scientific & State Records | Nobel Foundation Archives, Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) | Official patent filings, Nobel committee citations, legislative records, treaties |
| Tier 2: Academic Reference Standards | Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Encyclopædia Britannica, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Peer-reviewed consensus biographies, contested chronology resolutions |
| Tier 3: Cultural & Museum Catalogs | Smithsonian Open Access, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, British Museum | Artistic provenance, original photographic dates, exhibition archives |
3. Comprehensive Alias Validation & Transliteration Rules
Historical women have frequently been obscured by patronymics, marriage surnames, pseudonyms, or non-Latin alphabet transliterations. Our trivia string matching engine resolves these complexities:
- Dual Surnames & Maiden Names: We recognize maiden names, hyphenated surnames, and post-marriage names (e.g., Maria Skłodowska and Marie Curie; Augusta Ada Byron and Ada Lovelace).
- Pen Names & Pseudonyms: Authors who published under male or gender-neutral pseudonyms are indexed under both their historic pennames and legal identities (e.g., George Eliot and Mary Ann Evans; Currer Bell and Charlotte Brontë).
- Multilingual Transliteration: Figures from non-Latin scripts (Cyrillic, Hanzi, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Devanagari) support all major Romanized spelling conventions (e.g., Tu Youyou / Youyou Tu; Chien-Shiung Wu / Wu Chien Shiung).
- Pencil-Drop Engine Tolerance: String comparisons strip accents, punctuation, and capitalization to reward factual historical memory rather than keystroke precision.
4. Artificial Intelligence & Human Editorial Gate
In accordance with Google E-E-A-T guidelines:
- Algorithmic Assistance: Automated tools are utilized solely for regex pattern optimization, speed benchmarking, and code linting.
- Human Editorial Gate: Every biographical entry, date, and historical narrative is researched, drafted, and verified by human editors. We enforce a strict ban on automated AI text publication without human fact-checking.
- Dual-Source Consensus: No historical assertion is published unless corroborated by at least two independent scholarly databases.
5. Transparent Corrections & Errata Policy
When an error or contested chronology is identified, we act with swift transparency:
- Factual Corrections: Revisions to dates, discoveries, or aliases are committed to our database within 24 hours of scholarly verification.
- Public Attribution: Readers and educators who identify missing valid aliases or historical oversights are credited upon review.
- Submitting Errata: Email proposed corrections to [email protected] with the subject:
Correction: [Figure Name], including reputable academic citations.
6. Global & Intersectional Representation
We actively counterbalance traditional Western historiographical biases by highlighting women from the Global South, Indigenous civilizations, and marginalized demographics across 2,500 years of recorded history.