Publication Standards

In publishing content to this website, I intend to provide the material in such a way as to be most meaningful to as wide an audience as possible.  As such, the tone will tend to be more dispassionate and technical than personal, although I may make personal comments as and where I see them to be appropriate.

I do this primarily out of consideration for the audience which may be interested in the topics of discussion.  As I noted previously, I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but I recognize that not all who take an interest in material related to the LDS Church, or to the religious subjects in general, share my personal views.  I would like to present the content in such a way as to be most beneficial to readers with a wide range of views.

Sources

To that end, I intend to provide sources as they are available to me.  I am primarily concerned with primary sources (sacred texts, original accounts from eyewitnesses, etc.), but will use secondary sources, particularly on subjects where other authors have greater depth of expertise than I do.  Where online sources are available, I will link directly to them so that the reader can consult the sources directly.

I will be making some use of computer-assisted analysis of text sources.  Where I do so, I will provide a discussion of the tools and methodologies I have used, in case the reader is interested in reproducing the results.  Most of the technical tools should be public source or otherwise readily available; and at some point I intend to post some of my computer code and data outputs to the website for direct download.

Edits

In some cases, I will make edits to already published material.  I expect most updates will be in the form of footnotes as I become aware of additional information, but where significant inline text changes have been made, I will mark the changes in dark blue text (sample edit), and provide a date and explanation at the bottom of the post.  This is not entirely consistent with online practice (where edits are often marked with brackets and/or strikethrough text), but it is generally consistent with traditional publication standards.

Citations

If you make use of content on this site, please provide a reference back to this site when doing so, and a link back if using content in an online format.  This site is not for profit, so my primary motivation in this request is not financial, but to ensure that any content that comes from me can be referenced in full context, and that questions on it can be answered by me.

Corrections

Finally, I recognize that the content I am posting here may not be perfect or complete!  Please feel free to bring any corrections or omissions to my attention.  In particular, if I have missed a reference, please let me know.  The starting point for the studies that led to the creation of this website has been the simple recognition that I know less than I once thought I did.  I am still in the process of discovery on the subjects that I will be discussing here, so I would appreciate any additional information being brought to my attention.