How it works
How it works
This page explains where the records come from, what the labels on them mean, and who is able to change them. It is here so you can judge for yourself how much weight any single record should carry.
What a record is
Each person in the archive has one record: their name, what is known about their life, the circumstances of their death, where they are buried if that is known, and the testimony attached to them.
A record is a summary of sources, not a verdict. Where sources disagree or are thin, the record says so rather than smoothing it over.
Evidence levels
Every record and every piece of testimony carries a label describing how well supported it is. The label describes our evidence, not the person.
- Unverified
- Recorded, but not yet checked against any source we hold.
- Community-reported
- Comes from a documented report or a single source. Credible, but not independently confirmed.
- Corroborated
- Supported by two or more independent sources that agree on the substance.
- Verified
- Confirmed by a curator against primary documentation or direct family testimony.
Movements
Iran has had repeated waves of protest and state violence since 1979. Each record is attached to the movement it belongs to — Aban 98, Mahsa Amini, Kooye Daneshgah 78, and the rest — so that someone looking for a particular period does not have to read past every other one.
Movements are a curated list, not free-text tags. Adding or renaming one is an editorial decision about how a period is named.
Why locations are imprecise
Burial places are published at city or region precision, never as a plot. Families of those killed have been surveilled, summoned and harassed at gravesides, and several were compelled to bury their dead at night or in another city.
The circle drawn on a map marks an area. The cemetery is named in the text where it is known, and no coordinate in this archive was guessed or inferred: where a precise location is not public, the record says only what the sources say.
Languages and translation
The interface is written by hand in each language it offers. Record content is different: it is translated by machine as soon as a record is created, so the archive is readable in every language immediately.
Machine translation is always labelled as such, and the original is one click away. It is a starting point, not an authority — and personal names are never machine-translated, because a confidently wrong transliteration of a dead person’s name is worse than an untranslated one.
Any reader can propose a better translation. An approved human translation permanently replaces the machine one, and the machine will never overwrite it afterwards.
Contributing, and what happens next
You submit
Anyone can add testimony, propose a correction, offer a better translation, or attach a photograph or document. No account is needed, and you may remain anonymous.
It waits
Nothing you submit appears on a record straight away. Submissions enter a moderation queue, visible to curators only.
A curator reviews it
A moderator checks the submission against the sources and either applies it or declines it, with a reason.
The change is recorded
Approved changes are applied to the record and a new version is written, showing what changed and who approved it. Nothing is overwritten silently.
History and corrections
Every record keeps an append-only history. Earlier versions are superseded, never deleted, so a correction can be traced and, if it was wrong, undone.
Some things cannot be changed by submission at all: whether a record is public, how precisely a location is published, and its evidence level. Those are safety and editorial controls, and they stay with the curators.
If a record concerns your family and you want it corrected or withdrawn, contact the curators rather than filing a proposal.
Search
Search runs across names, biographies, places, testimony and every translation, so a query typed in Persian or German will find a record written in English.
Results can be narrowed by movement, evidence level, place, tags and date, and sorted by date, name or age.