Publishing principles

Short rules for what appears on this site. For visitors and living relatives, see also Privacy.

Sources

The core is the family archive: manuscripts, photographs, letters, official papers.
Diary text and photo captions rest on the original (notebook, form, seal) when possible, not on paraphrase alone.
Editorial notes are kept distinct from the source: context, not invented memory.
Third-party open sources (e.g. reference pages) are credited when used.

Illegible or disputed passages are marked ([?], “needs verification”), not polished into a guess.
An unknown letter-writer surname is not invented; name forms (Timosha, Dmitry, Misha…) are not merged without evidence in the text.
Dates and identifications that conflict stay cautious until a document or a clear manuscript statement confirms them.
Links among people, places, and events in the public archive graph carry a confidence level (from “document-confirmed” to “uncertain”) — see the project relation vocabulary in the repository docs.

For living people, public text usually gives only a name, relationship, and birth year (no day or month), if publication is appropriate at all.
We do not deliberately publish phone numbers, e-mail addresses, precise modern homes, or document numbers of living people.
Some notebook leaves are withheld from standalone pages or galleries (including 099–100; scans such as 155 and 157 may remain under static without public links).
Requests to hide or correct material: Privacy.

It does not replace the archive with a sensational biography.
It does not conflate different people with similar names (e.g. Timofey Petrovich vs Timofey Timofeevich).
It does not claim that every manuscript page is published: release is deliberate, driven by sources and ethics.