EsoVitae publishes articles about historical puzzles, contested artifacts, folklore and unexplained claims. This page explains who writes them, how they are made, and what to do when you find a mistake.
Who writes the articles
Articles are published under one byline: EsoVitae Editorial. That is the site, not a person. No article is credited to an individual writer, expert or reviewer.
Earlier articles carried the names of eleven house writers, each with a short biography and a job title. Those writers were invented. They were not real people and held none of the credentials or roles their profiles described. We have retired those names, and their author pages now lead to our About page.
How an article is made
- Drafted with AI assistance. Each article is drafted with the help of AI language models, working from published sources: books, journal papers, museum and archive records, official documents and news reports.
- Sources are listed. Articles name the sources they were drafted from. Some older articles show numbered citation markers without the list underneath; we are adding those lists.
- No claimed expertise. Articles are not written or checked by a credentialed specialist, and they should not be read as expert advice. Where the evidence is thin or disputed, the article should say so.
Images
Images on EsoVitae are AI-generated illustrations unless a caption says otherwise. They show how a scene or an object might have looked. They are not photographs of real artifacts, places or people, and they are not evidence for anything an article describes.
Fieldwork we did not do
Some earlier articles described first-hand fieldwork, site visits, interviews and personal observations. None of that happened. No one from EsoVitae carried out the expeditions, conversations or field seasons those passages described. We have removed those passages, and we will remove any we have missed as soon as we find them.
Dates
Each article shows the date it was first published. An article shows an “Updated” date only when its content has changed in a way that matters to a reader, such as a correction, a rewrite or new sources. Changes to page code, layout or formatting do not count as updates.
Corrections
If you find a factual error, a misread source, a broken citation or an image presented in a misleading way, please tell us through the contact page. Include the article address and, if you can, a source for the correct information.
When a correction changes what an article says, we fix the text and the article shows an “Updated” date. If a claim cannot be supported by a source, we remove it. If an article turns out to be built on something that is not true, we take it down.