Editorial policy
How a record gets in, what is deliberately left unwritten, and how a mistake gets fixed.
What earns a page
A place gets a page only when concrete information about it can be found: where it stands, when it was built, what condition it is in today. If that cannot be established, no record is opened.
Depth comes before breadth. A city page with a single place in it is worse than no page at all — the promise is not kept, and what remains is three thin pages in three languages.
If it is not known, it is not written
When a price or an opening time is not certain, the field says so plainly: "Variable — confirm at the door". A wrong price is worse than no price.
The same holds for coordinates. An unverified location is never plotted, and that record simply goes without a map. A wrong pin is worse than no pin.
Images
Photographs come only from archives open to commercial use: public domain, CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA. Non-commercial (NC) and no-derivatives (ND) licences are refused. Source and rights holder are printed under the image.
Every automatically found image is approved by a person. A search for "Bab Sharqi" can return the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem; an image that cannot be verified is not used, and the record stays deliberately without one. A wrong photograph is worse than none.
Maps
Every record with coordinates carries a real map. The images are rendered on our server at deploy time from OpenStreetMap tiles; a route line follows actual road geometry rather than hopping straight between stops.
On the visitor side there is no third-party request, no cookie and no JavaScript.
Writing about damage
War damage is neither hidden nor turned into lament. We write "where the minaret fell in 2013"; we do not write "our lost heritage". A reader is deciding whether to go somewhere — both overstatement and cover-up ruin that decision.
Updates and corrections
Every page carries the date it was last touched. Fields like price and opening hours drift over time, and that date tells the reader how fresh they are.
If you have spotted something wrong, or want a record taken down, tell us. Correction requests are handled before anything else in the queue.