Editorial handbook

Lector (Reader) reads the library. Scriptor (Contributor) proposes transcriptions, translations and corrections. Magister (Editor) reviews other people’s proposals and may create scoped keys for bulk submission. Custos (Owner) appoints contributors and editors, maintains the platform and settles editorial policy.

A Magister’s approval publishes an eligible submission. Review your colleague’s evidence, not merely their reputation. Never decide your own submission, including one uploaded through your agent key. Ask another editor or the Custos to review it. Only the Custos retains the exceptional authority to approve their own work. An agent submission key stages work for review; it does not publish it.

Use your own key. Do not share accounts or borrow another person’s key to bypass independent review. Bulk uploading and scholarly authorship are separate facts: preserve the translator/transcriber attribution, and disclose whether the agent generated text or only transported it. Bulk imports currently do not earn human contribution points.

Identify the edition and the exact passage before reviewing the text. Record the source URL, bibliographic details, page or section locator, and the applicable rights basis and attribution. Every imported text must refer to a declared source. Translation provenance and permission must be considered separately from the Latin edition.

Do not invent publication details, permission, missing passages or an edition reading. If evidence is missing or the rights claim cannot be substantiated, request that evidence before approval. Source metadata already registered under a source key must be reused exactly; obtain it from the API’s guard context rather than retyping it.

Collate the submission against its cited edition before normalizing style. Correct OCR corruption to the reading supported by the print. Preserve the author’s spelling variants, such as authoritas and auctoritas, unless a verified reading or clear OCR error warrants correction.

Follow the edition’s punctuation, capitalization, italics and paragraphing. Do not rewrite an argument to make it more persuasive, smooth away a difficulty, or silently modernize a witness. Edition-specific conventions explain how these rules apply to a particular work; they do not silently replace the handbook.

Apply these rules to Latin body text and Latin section titles:

• Write consonantal i, not medieval j: Iesus, iustitia, eius, obiectum.
• Expand æ/Æ and œ/Œ to ae/AE and oe/OE: quae, Ecclesiae, poena.
• Expand an ampersand to et with appropriate spacing; &c. becomes etc.
• Write vowel u and consonant v: verbum, virtus, civitas. In early prints, PROBATVR becomes PROBATUR and QVOD becomes QUOD. Preserve Roman numerals such as XV and standing citation abbreviations. This requires lexical judgment, not a global V-to-U replacement.
• Remove OCR-spurious diacritics. Preserve genuine disambiguating diaeresis supported by the edition.

Do not apply Latin replacements to Greek or Hebrew, URLs, machine-readable citation targets, or quoted printed readings in an editorial note. Preserve Greek and Hebrew faithfully. A mechanical pass must show a word-level diff containing only intended changes. If u/v normalization is ambiguous, retain the supported reading and explain the uncertainty.

Preserve the text’s structure. Keep a footnote attached to its passage and use the platform’s Markdown footnote syntax; a note marker must not introduce a new paragraph block. Check note bodies and continuation paragraphs in the preview.

Review section titles separately from body text. Preserve meaningful numbering and use the edition’s hierarchy. Do not paste a flat list into a work with repeated section slugs: resolve the complete parent path.

Preserve canonical citation targets byte-for-byte in links such as [[display|canonical-key:locus]]. Translate or restyle the display text when appropriate, never the target. Link a new cross-reference only after checking the live work key and resolvable locus; otherwise retain a plain-text reference. Do not guess a target.

When evidence is inconclusive, stop an unproductive search and record the uncertainty at the passage. Use an editorial footnote and retain the finding in the work’s review notes. Explain the reading chosen and the evidence available.

Emend the print itself only when the evidence is decisive. An editorial note must quote the printed reading so it is never lost and explain why the emendation was made. Correcting OCR and correcting the edition are different editorial acts. Escalate a material unresolved judgment to the Custos; uncertainty must not disappear between review and publication.

Translate approved Latin without silently repairing it. Preserve the argument’s distinctions, negations, qualifications and citations. Use consistent terminology for scholastic concepts; fluent prose must not replace a technical distinction with a different claim.

Keep each translation paragraph aligned with its Latin counterpart. Check both the count and the meaning of the paired paragraphs: equal counts alone do not prove alignment. Preserve footnotes, citations and formatting, and review translated titles. Treat another translation as a comparator, not authority over the Latin. If the Latin needs correction, submit that correction as a separate reviewed change.

Record the translator and source provenance, including agent involvement where applicable. Do not label a generated translation as a historical translator’s work.

Approve when fidelity, structure and provenance are supported and the text is ready to publish. Inspect the whole proposed change and its validation warnings; a clean validator result does not establish scholarly correctness.

Fix reliable mechanical defects through the reviewed correction mechanism rather than rejecting an otherwise faithful contribution for typography alone. Preserve the contributor’s credit and make the correction visible. Request revision when repair requires substantial reconstruction or unresolved judgment. Explain the exact passage, evidence and change needed, with a handbook link. Reject fabricated, unfaithful or unsupported material with respectful, concrete reasons.

For a bulk batch, inspect its affected works, languages and sections. Approval applies to the entire batch. If some sections need separate decisions, ask for coherent replacement batches rather than assuming a partial approval. A corrected pending batch is a new revision; never edit away its history.

Cite the version used, for example: “Editorial handbook 2026-09-08, Latin orthography.” The section heading links below are stable citations. Later policy changes do not rewrite this edition. The Custos approves handbook changes; propose a documented clarification when a recurring case reveals a gap.

Create a corpus-import key in Agent tools and give your agent the portable toolkit. Keep the secret in an environment variable, never in a manifest, chat log or repository. Use a descriptive key label and the shortest practical lifetime. Revocation quarantines pending batches instead of deleting them; only the Custos can release quarantine after investigation.

To add a translation to an existing work, use append_texts for sections that do not yet have that language. Do not duplicate the work or use append to overwrite an existing translation. Fetch the current outline and source guard context. Split a large work into coherent review units that fit the API limits, then submit each as a pending manifest. Keep the returned batch ID and stable slug for status and retry recovery.

Magisters may stage new works, added sections and missing-language translations. Canonical metadata changes, structural repair and whole-work reconciliation require the Custos. A replacement key owned by the same person can continue a revision chain; it cannot claim another person’s batch or undo a quarantine.