Editorial standards

The Scripture Guide is a small site with one editor and no institutional backing. This page says plainly who writes and checks what, what a citation must meet before it is published, where the artificial intelligence is and is not, and how to tell us when we are wrong.

1. Who writes and checks the pages

Anthoney Hamrick — Founder and editor, The Faith Vault. Anthoney writes the question library, tradition pages and Scripture Explorer, chooses every passage, and opens each citation in the linked reference edition before it is published. He is not a scholar or clergy member of any of the nine traditions and does not claim to speak for any of them; the pages describe what the traditions teach in their own texts, and every claim points to a passage you can read yourself. Editorial pages carry his name and the date of the last citation review. Reach him at contact@thescriptureguide.com.

The Faith Vault (thefaithvault.com) is the publisher, and the code is public at github.com/CyberAdSpace.

2. Reviewers by tradition

We do not yet have a reviewer for every tradition, and we will not pretend otherwise. The table below is the honest state of the review bench. When a seat is filled, the reviewer's name, affiliation and the pages they checked will appear here and on those pages.

If you are a scholar, clergy member or practitioner who would review the passages for your tradition — usually two or three hours of reading, credited by name or anonymously — please write to us.

3. What a citation must meet

• It exists. Every reference on an editorial page was opened in the linked public edition (see Our Sources) and the passage was read.
• It says what we say it says. The one-line gist next to each reference was compared with the passage. If the passage only partly supports the summary, the gist says so or the passage is not used.
• It links as deep as the edition allows — verse, paragraph, chapter row, section or entry — so a reader lands on the passage, not a home page.
• It is labelled. Each perspective carries an evidence label (below) so a scriptural teaching is never dressed up as more, or less, than it is.
• It is never invented. A passage that could not be confirmed is not published, and no reference is presented as verified unless a person opened it.

4. Evidence labels

Nine traditions do not answer every question in the same way, and a nine-slot layout must not force them to. Each perspective is labelled with the kind of evidence behind it:

• From scripture — Grounded in the tradition's primary texts.
• From commentary and teaching — Grounded chiefly in later commentary, law or teaching rather than a single scriptural passage.
• From myth and chronicle — Drawn from narrative chronicles rather than doctrinal teaching; the tradition has no creed on this point.
• Expressed through practice — no direct text — This tradition has no doctrinal text on the question; the sources show how it is enacted in ritual and practice.

Shinto, which has no single canonical scripture, most often carries the last two labels. That is not a gap in the tradition; it is an accurate description of how it speaks.

5. Where the AI is, and is not

Everything reachable from the question library, the tradition pages, the Scripture Explorer and these information pages is written and checked by a person and does not change between visits. Only Ask the Vault produces live answers, and those are generated by a large language model at the moment you ask. Live answers are labelled as AI-generated, their citations are checked automatically against the known structure of each text (a surah and ayah that do not exist, a Dhammapada verse above 423, an Ang above 1430 are removed and logged), and they are still to be opened and read before being relied on. The full method is on Methodology; the live-answer test protocol is published in the repository's qa folder.

6. Neutrality

Traditions are never ranked, scored or declared correct. They appear in a fixed order that carries no meaning. Descriptive language is used throughout, and disagreement within a tradition is named rather than smoothed over. The same standard applies to every tradition.

7. Corrections and updates

Every editorial page shows the date of its last citation review. When a reader reports an error we (a) open the citation, (b) fix the passage, gist or label, (c) note the change in the repository's commit history, and (d) reply to the reporter. Substantive corrections to a page are listed at the foot of that page. To report one, email contact@thescriptureguide.com with the page address and the passage concerned; we aim to answer within seven days.

8. Independence

The Scripture Guide is free to read, carries no advertising, sells nothing and accepts no payment from any religious body. It is built and paid for by its editor.