Industry
How the research is done
The record states facts about several hundred real companies and people: when they began, who bought whom and for how much, whether they still exist. These are the rules every statement follows, with the record's own examples, and the checks that fail the build when a rule is broken.
What counts as a source
Primary first. A company's own filings and the press releases filed with them (a Form 8-K exhibit is the company stating the date and the price under its own name), the company registry for a Brazilian company (the CNPJ record, with its constitution date), the vendor's own documentation for a product fact. Then the press of record, dated. Wikipedia is used as a map to primary sources and is cited as what it is, an encyclopaedia, with its infobox read on a given day.
Every entry lists its sources at its foot, with the date each was read, and every founding year on a card is named by one of them. A chat transcript is never a source: the build refuses a citation that points at one, because a conversation with a language model is not evidence of anything about a company.
Where an entry states something about Rodolfo Nützmann's own work with a company, the source is the portfolio: the dated CVs and the LinkedIn record, read in the order they were written, the earliest closest to the fact.
Founded, incorporated, and where a story begins
A card's founding year is the year its own named subject was founded, not its earliest ancestor's. Unisys was founded in 1986, even though its lineage reaches Burroughs in 1886; Riverstone in 2000, not Yago Systems in 1996. Three cards were wrong under the older rule and were corrected on 2 October 2026.
Where a card's story begins before its subject, the record says so in a separate field, and the timeline places the card where the story starts: CommScope was founded in 1976, and its card sits at 1961, where Superior Continental's Comm/Scope division begins, with the predecessor named beside the year. On a card that is explicitly a lineage of several companies, the year is the earliest company's and the card says whose it is.
Incorporation is not founding. A company registered in January 2004 may have been trading since 1992 under another legal person; the record keeps both facts and does not pick one.
Acquisition dates and prices
An acquisition has at least two dates, announced and completed, and the record prefers the completion date from the filing that reports it, with the price as that filing states it: Plantronics completed Polycom on 2 July 2018 for an enterprise value of 2.0 billion dollars, HP completed Poly on 29 August 2022 at 40 dollars a share, CommScope completed Avaya's Connectivity Solutions effective 31 January 2004 for 250 million dollars in cash and about 1.8 million shares.
Where the sources give two prices, both are recorded and the disagreement is stated: Wikipedia's own citations give Arris at 7.4 and at 4.93 billion dollars. The record does not average, round or choose.
Uncertain dates
When sources disagree about a date, the disagreement is the fact. TDec registers in March 1992 and brands itself established 1993; InLearn was constituted in 2002 and presents itself as teaching since 2008; Tenable's incorporation is given as 16 September 2002 by most sources and 4 October by one. Each entry says so, in those words, rather than picking the tidier year.
A date the record cannot source is left out rather than estimated. A founding year with no citation on its own entry fails the build, which is why a few entries carry a declared reason in place of a year.
Whether a company still exists
An entry carries an ending only when a sourced event ended the company's independent existence: absorbed, renamed away, or wound up, with the year and the note. Absent, the marker means still trading as far as the sources read say, not that the question was never asked.
These markers are set by review, never by pattern-matching the prose. A first attempt to derive them automatically from the timelines produced roughly thirty wrong answers out of forty-eight, because a sentence cannot be read for direction by a regular expression: a company acquiring and a company acquired look the same to one. The site's source-liveness run re-checks every cited link on a schedule and records what has moved.
Corrections
A wrong date, a dead source, a company that has since been sold: the contact page has a route for it, and a correction that lands is recorded in the changelog with its source, so the record's history of being wrong is itself on the record.
The record also corrects itself against its author. Where the portfolio says one date and a badge says another, the portfolio wins and the badge is called what it is, a badge date; the chapters say so where it happened.
The checks that enforce the rules
Each rule above is a script that runs before every build and fails it when the rule is broken. Named here so a reader can tell an enforced rule from a stated intention.
check-sourcesEvery industry entry cites at least one source; the number of uncited entries may only go down, and it is zero.check-source-hostsNo citation may point at a chat transcript.check-vendor-founded-sourcesEvery founding year on a card is named by a citation on that entry, a story that begins before the subject is dated earlier than its founding, and a lineage card says whose year it shows.check-placeholder-sourcesA source label may not be an appeal to ubiquity, a bare 'documented', a field name with a number, or the entry's own name with a year.check-person-year-sourcesEvery year on a person's entry is named by a source.check-partner-duplicatesNo two entries share a slug, and every overlap of names is declared with a reason.check-citation-fieldsEvery field that can carry a URL is known to the liveness audit, so no link escapes the re-check.
None of this makes the record complete, and it is not meant to: it makes every statement in it traceable to a page somebody can open, on a date somebody wrote down. The chronology, the chapters and the people are built on those terms.