Corrections

The comparative-mystery-school research corpus is a working scholarly resource. Corrections from informed readers, named scholars, current and former practitioners, journalists with access to source material we did not have, and any other party who can support a correction with appropriate evidence are welcome and explicitly invited.

This page documents the submission process, the evidentiary standard, the review workflow, and the public correction log convention.

What counts as a correction

The corpus distinguishes between corrections (factual errors that should be fixed) and disagreements (interpretive or framing disputes the corpus has handled with attribution).

Corrections include:

• A factually wrong date, name, place, organizational structure, doctrinal position, or citation
• A primary-source citation that does not say what the dossier represents it as saying
• A scholar misattributed a position they do not hold (or no longer hold in their published work)
• A living-person attribution that misidentifies an institutional role or current affiliation
• A typographical or transcription error in a quotation
• A missing material consideration the dossier should have addressed and did not
• A reference to a dead URL where a live one or an archive.org snapshot exists

Disagreements (which are not corrections):

• “I am a practitioner of tradition X and the dossier does not capture my inner experience” — the corpus is descriptive of the published-edge record and does not arbitrate inner experience; it documents the field, not the practice
• “My tradition is true and the dossier should say so” — the corpus does not arbitrate metaphysical truth claims
• “Scholar A is wrong; you should drop their position” — the corpus documents what scholars on the published roster have argued and how the field has received it; where the field is divided, the division is documented with attribution; the corpus does not arbitrate field-level disputes
• “The dossier’s tone is biased against my tradition” — if the dossier adopts editorial framing as voice rather than attributing it to named sources, that is a correction; if it documents what named scholars have written about the tradition with appropriate attribution, that is documentation rather than bias

If you are unsure which category your input falls into, submit anyway with sourcing — the review process will categorize it.

Evidentiary standard

The corpus is held to a primary-source-citation standard. Corrections must meet the same standard.

Acceptable evidence for a correction:

• Primary text from the tradition itself (canonical scripture, organizational publication, founder’s own writing, court filing, registration document, etc.) with a citable edition
• Peer-reviewed scholarly publication contradicting the dossier’s claim
• Field-level scholar’s named published position (with citation) where the dossier represented their position incorrectly
• Documented institutional record (membership rolls, succession documents, organizational charters, archive holdings) that contradicts the dossier’s claim
• For dead URLs: a live URL or archive.org snapshot
• For misquotations: the original source the quotation came from, properly cited

Not acceptable as standalone evidence:

• Anonymous internet posts or unsigned forum claims
• Personal communication from a member of the tradition not supported by a citable published record (we may pursue this with the original speaker, but cannot integrate it as a standalone citation)
• “Everyone knows” or “common knowledge in the community” without a documentable source
• An apostate’s testimony without cross-reference to a citable published account (apostate testimony in the corpus is attributed to named published sources; private apostate communication is gathered through the verification process described below)
• Hostile sources (sectarian polemic, terrorist-organization-controlled outlets, partisan political publications presented as scholarship) used to discredit a tradition
• Apologetic-tradition publications used to validate a tradition

If your correction depends on a primary source that exists but is not publicly accessible (archived correspondence, sealed court records, restricted academic collections), name the source and the accessibility constraint — we may pursue it through scholarly channels.

Submission

Submit corrections through the publisher’s standard contact channel at thefire.lol. Include:

1. The specific dossier filename and section heading the correction applies to (e.g., “modern-hermeticism-2026-05.md, the Stuart Nettleton / Society of Inner Light section”)
2. The exact passage the correction concerns (quote it, or cite line numbers)
3. The proposed correction — what should the corpus say instead
4. The supporting evidence — citations, links, document references, with the same primary-source standard the dossier itself holds to
5. Your name and affiliation (or your preferred attribution style if you wish to be credited as anonymous, pseudonymous, or generic-roster-only)
6. Any conflict-of-interest disclosure that is relevant (e.g., “I am a current member of the order discussed,” “I am the apostate the dossier cites,” “I am the scholar whose position is at issue”)

Corrections without the supporting-evidence step are returned with a request for sourcing rather than processed as submissions.

Review workflow

Submitted corrections move through the following stages:

1. Receipt — submission acknowledged within reasonable time (typical: under two weeks for routine; same-week for urgent factual error with clear sourcing)
2. Categorization — correction vs. disagreement; if disagreement, response explaining the corpus’s position and any attribution adjustment that may still be warranted
3. Evidence review — does the supporting evidence meet the corpus standard
4. Cross-check — independent verification against the corpus’s own scholar roster and primary sources
5. Integration decision — accept (correction lands in next dossier revision), partial accept (some elements integrate, others do not), or decline (with reason)
6. Implementation — the dossier is updated; the correction log records what changed and on whose evidence
7. Notification — the submitter is notified that their correction landed (or not) and how they were credited (or not)

Verified corrections from named submitters are credited in the correction log unless the submitter explicitly requests anonymity. Anonymous corrections are credited as anonymous in the log; the corpus does not silently absorb credited work without attribution.

The review process is not adversarial. We assume good-faith submission. Most corrections that reach us are accepted at least partially. Where we decline, we document the reason so the submitter can see the corpus’s reasoning rather than experiencing an opaque rejection.

The correction log

A public correction log lives at this page (below) and at each dossier’s footer (where the most recent corrections for that dossier are listed). The log records:

• Date the correction landed
• Dossier and section affected
• Summary of what was corrected (the previous claim and the corrected claim, in one sentence each)
• Submitter (named, pseudonymous, or anonymous per submitter’s preference)
• Evidence cited for the correction (the source that made the case)

The log is append-only — corrections are not retroactively edited or removed. Where a correction is later itself shown to be wrong, that is logged as a subsequent correction; the first correction stays in the log as part of the historical record.

This convention serves two purposes. It makes the corpus’s evolution visible — readers can see how the project has been improved by external input. And it makes the project accountable — claims made and later corrected do not vanish from the record.

What we will not do

• We will not delete a dossier in response to a correction. Corrections amend; they do not erase. If a dossier’s central thesis turns out to be unsupportable, we will say so, rewrite it under the correction’s evidence, and log the rewrite — we will not silently disappear the prior version.
• We will not name uninvolved third parties in response to a correction request. If your correction requires identifying someone whose identity is not already in the dossier or in the published source material, that information will not be added to the corpus, and we will explain why.
• We will not adopt an attribution we cannot verify. If you tell us “scholar X said Y” but X’s published work does not say Y, we will not integrate the correction; we will document our finding and respond to you.
• We will not arbitrate metaphysical truth claims. A correction that amounts to “your dossier should say my tradition is true” will be redirected to the Research Ethics and Purpose page.
• We will not credit anonymous submitters as named scholars to manufacture authority. Anonymous is anonymous; pseudonymous is pseudonymous; named is named.

When the correction concerns a published book

The Fires Series and Evil Robots Series books are separate published works under their own All-Rights-Reserved copyright. Corrections to book content follow a different process — they accumulate in author errata logs and are integrated in subsequent editions or supplementary materials. For corrections to book content, contact the publisher through the same channel; specify that the correction applies to a book rather than to the website corpus, and the submission is routed accordingly.

Where a correction applies to both a book and a corpus dossier (the same claim appearing in both places), the correction is processed against both. The corpus is updated immediately; the book correction is logged for the next edition cycle.

What the corpus cannot fix through corrections

The corpus is limited by the encoded-teaching pattern, by the scholarly access constraints documented in the Research Ethics and Purpose page, and by the working-medium of published scholarly synthesis. A correction cannot:

• Make the operative interior of a living tradition publicly knowable (the dossier closes with “what this dossier still cannot cover”; corrections cannot move material out of that section that the tradition has reserved)
• Resolve a contested-succession dispute the field has not resolved (a correction can document a position with new evidence; it cannot adjudicate)
• Extend the corpus’s coverage indefinitely (gaps will exist; corrections add depth and accuracy to what is documented, not endless new dossier-scale content)

For new-dossier requests rather than corrections to existing material, contact through the publisher and we will consider the addition against the project’s capacity.

Correction log

This section is the public correction log. Entries are appended in date order, most recent at the top.

No corrections logged yet. The corpus was first published in May 2026; corrections are invited.

Contact

Corrections, sourcing pointers, and verification offers: through the publisher’s standard contact channel at thefire.lol. Time-sensitive corrections involving living individuals’ factual misrepresentation are flagged in the subject line and routed for expedited review.

Last updated: 2026-05-14. Maintained by 4LULZ Press / thefire.lol.