Checking is a job. Jobs get funded.
The published record is full of good work and dead papers, and it is nobody’s job to check it. Checking has become cheap. It has never been paid for. SaneCite exists to do the checking in public, and to be funded for it.
“Open source is a graveyard of good intentions.”
Good tools die when nobody pays the people who keep them alive. Checking the record is the same: everyone agrees it matters, and nobody funds it. So SaneCite is built the other way round. The work comes first and is published whole. The ask comes second.
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
2 Timothy 1:7Power
You can verify every number yourself. The data and the method are public, and the code is open source.
Love
Built to repair the record, not to shame people. Free and open source, for anyone who needs it.
Sound Mind
Flags, not verdicts. No outrage, no villains. Just the count, the evidence and the limits.
- Whole sets only. I never pick targets.
- Method published before the run. Raw results published with it.
- A flag is not an accusation. A citation error is never called fraud.
- Anyone named gets to reply. The reply is attached to the record.
- No funder pays more than about a quarter of a disputed campaign.
- A campaign that misses its finish twice loses its funding.
- My own numbers get checked too. If one fails a re-run, I say so at the top of the page.
I tried it on my own library first.
Via Patrum holds 328 works of the early Church Fathers, translated from Greek and Latin. All 7,504 of its recorded passages were checked one by one, and every defect went on a public list.