Sources and evidence

Each assertion on this site names the class of source behind it, and the class is part of the claim. A contemporaneous document, an official post-flight report, an oral history recorded decades later, and a secondary account are all useful, and they are not interchangeable. Where they disagree, the disagreement is shown.

A source link points at the canonical item page in the repository that holds it — not at a local file, a database, or a copy hosted here. That is deliberate: a citation you cannot follow to the original is not a citation.

Media carries its own provenance separately from the text: the exact credit, the rights basis and the date that basis was recorded, any obligations, the permitted use, and every transformation applied to produce the version you are looking at.

Nothing is published as public evidence without a recorded rights basis. Where rights are uncertain, the record is held rather than published with a hopeful credit line. If you hold rights in something published here and the record is wrong, the corrections page is the fastest route to a person.