The trust tiers
Every entry carries exactly one trust level, and it is always visible. An entry rises only in one direction, never silently.
AI-aggregated— compiled by the research pipeline and schema-checked, but not yet reviewed by people of the culture. Treat it as a well-read stranger’s first draft.
Community-affirmed — people who live the custom have endorsed or corrected it. It still stays open to further correction.
Elder-verified — reviewed by a named knowledge holder who has consented to stand behind it. This is the gold standard, and it is credited to a person, not a machine.
Corrections and disputes
Every entry has a way to say “this is wrong” or “we do it differently.” We treat those as data, not complaints. A dispute is recorded, never erased. When accounts genuinely differ between families, regions, or houses, we keep them side by side rather than crowning one, because plural truth is truer than a forced consensus. We correct or add on this basis; we do not quietly delete a history because someone finds it inconvenient.
Sacred and sensitive knowledge
Not everything should be written down, and we know it. Material moves along a sensitivity scale, from openly public, to community, to clan, to sacred and not recorded. Initiation rites and closed ceremonies are described only at their public surface, the outline anyone may know, never the interior that belongs to its initiates. When a custom asks for silence, we keep it. If we have exposed something that should have been held, tell us and we will pull it back.
Our use of AI
uVelaphi is built with AI assistance, and we say so rather than hide it. A language model compiles the first draft of each entry; it never gets the last word, and its output is always labeled as unverified until people confirm it. The governing rule is simple: unverified content must be impossible to mistake for verified. How that first draft is made is set out in full on our methodology page.
What we will not do
We do not enforce culture or police how anyone practises it. We do not declare a single orthodox version of a custom. We do not flatten the continent’s thousands of cultures into a tidy average. And we are not a legal, medical, financial, or religious authority, for decisions with real stakes, speak to a qualified person and to your own elders.
Your data
We keep an anonymous cookie so your reading and any conversations stay yours, and we log searches (without identifying you) to learn what the record is missing. Contact details you volunteer with a correction are used only to follow up on it. Heritage is sensitive by nature, and we treat it that way.
Reaching us
For now, the fastest way to reach us is the correction form on any custom or name entry, it lands with the people who tend the record. A dedicated contact channel is coming as the community grows.