Studio note: rewriting a culture archive from its sources
The Corner is the archive of Turkish and Turkic civilisation on our site: rulers, thinkers, calligraphers, mushafs, miniaturists, epics and composers. In October 2026 we rewrote it from end to end against its sources. Today it holds 373 entries — about 172,000 words in all — and 701 source links, most of them to the TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam. Along the way we weeded out the fabricated figures, works and dates in the old data.
This note explains how and why we did it. The accuracy of a website’s content now matters not only to readers, but to the search engines and AI assistants that quote it.
Why did we rewrite it?
When the Corner began, it was 375 short pages. Each entry had a summary of a few sentences and a reference line. The pages looked elegant; the content was both thin and unreliable.
When we checked one entry, we found the problem wasn’t confined to a single page. The reference lines held dates nobody could source, titles of works that don’t exist and figures with no counterpart anywhere. In a culture archive, a wrong date is harder to spot than a wrong price — and it lives far longer.
There were two risks:
- The reader’s risk. Someone reading the Corner could learn a false fact as true and repeat it elsewhere.
- The quotation risk. Search engines and AI assistants carry sentences from websites into their answers. A wrong reference could circulate under our name. We cover this in visibility in AI search.
How did we work?
We rebuilt every entry under one rule: not a single sentence without a reliable source behind it. The method had four steps:
- Find the source first. For each entry we first found the relevant article in the TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam — a major scholarly reference work published in Turkish — and other scholarly sources where needed.
- Check the reference line against it. Birth and death dates, titles of works, honorifics and figures were checked one by one.
- Remove what the source doesn’t say. Every claim without a counterpart in the source was deleted. We didn’t fill the gaps with guesses.
- Show the source on the page. Each entry now ends with a “Sources” section listing the links it rests on.
The text grew longer in the process, but length wasn’t the real gain. Every paragraph of every long entry is now tied to a source the reader can click and check.
What kinds of errors did we find?
Most of the errors were details that looked plausible at first glance. A few examples:
| Entry | In the old data | Corrected against the sources |
|---|---|---|
| Kaygusuz Abdal | Name spelt “Kayguzuz Abdal” | The correct name is Kaygusuz Abdal; the old address now redirects to the new page |
| The Türeyiş epic | A different Chinese chronicle cited | The Book of Zhou, the Book of Sui and the History of the Northern Dynasties; 7th century |
| The Ergenekon epic | Told as “the Mongol army broke the Türks” | In Rashid al-Din and Abu’l-Ghazi the heroes are ancestors of the Mongols; its adoption as a Turkic epic belongs to the 19th and 20th centuries |
| The Oğuz Khagan epic | “Spoke at three days old, rode a horse at forty” | In the text he suckles once, asks for raw meat and koumiss, and in forty days is grown and walking |
The Kaygusuz Abdal case may look minor. But when a name is misspelt, a reader searching for it never finds the page. To avoid losing the old address, we used a permanent redirect, so old links still reach the right page. How to keep search visibility through address changes is covered in redesigning a website without losing SEO.
The errors in the epic entries were subtler. The retellings were lovely and fluent, but scenes absent from the source texts had been added, and the origins of some legends had been confused. In correcting them we tried to keep the poetry of the telling while saying nothing the source doesn’t say.
What did we remove?
Headings we couldn’t verify against a source were removed rather than corrected. The entries for Sieli, Yotsen, Targitios and Tudun left the archive for that reason. Readers arriving at those addresses are redirected to the relevant Turkic history section.
It wasn’t an easy decision, because every page is a way in from search results. Still, keeping an unsourced page live would have weakened the credibility of the rest of the archive.
What did the work teach us?
In a content archive, accuracy is the first step of writing. The rules we took from the Corner apply, in our view, to any content work:
- No claim without a source. A date, figure or title doesn’t reach the page until it’s tied to a source.
- The source is visible on the page. Readers should see where a claim comes from on the same page.
- Removal is a correction too. Content that can’t be verified is removed, with a redirect.
- Addresses are preserved. When a name or heading changes, the old address is linked to the new page with a permanent redirect.
The technical side of these rules — redirects, structured data, indexing — is gathered in our technical SEO checklist. Why long-term content upkeep matters is covered in why website maintenance matters.
Frequently asked questions
What sources does the Corner rely on?
Mostly the TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam. There are 701 source links in all, and every entry lists the links it rests on under a “Sources” heading at the end. Readers can check each claim against its source.
What should I do if I spot an error?
Write to us through our contact page. We check every reported error against its source and correct it if it holds. The archive’s accuracy grows stronger with readers’ feedback too.
What happened to the addresses of removed pages?
We removed four headings that couldn’t be verified against a source and redirected their addresses to the relevant Turkic history section. Name corrections, too, link the old address to the new page with a permanent redirect, so old links don’t break.
Do you run this kind of review on clients’ site content?
It’s something we can discuss as part of maintenance. Our view is that checking the sources of claims and weeding out content that can’t be verified belongs in content and search-visibility maintenance. See how we work on our SEO and maintenance page.
If you’d like to explore the archive yourself, start at the Corner — for instance, the thinkers section, where you’ll find Kaygusuz Abdal’s entry and its sources.