What can be checked today
Tools
The Initiative does not yet operate a tool of its own. This page describes the tools it refers to today: what they do, what they do not do, and who operates them.
How tools are presented here
A tool is listed on this page only with three statements: what it does, where its limits lie, and who operates it. Being listed here is not a recommendation to use a service, and naming a data source does not imply a partnership with it.
arabianscript.com
The platform arabianscript.com is primarily in Arabic and has an English version. It contains the two tools described below. Its relationship to the founder of the Initiative is set out on the Disclosure page.
Manuscript metasearch
The metasearch brings together manuscript records from several catalogues and collections: Fihrist, Qalamos, HMML, and sources that publish their images through IIIF. Records link back to the institution that holds the manuscript; the share of records with a valid link is to be set out in the first methods report.
Digitised images are not copied. Where a holding institution publishes them through IIIF, an open standard for sharing images, the record links to them at that institution.
This page gives no figure for the size of the index. A count will appear only with an evidence card, once the first methods report has been published (see Methods and Results).
Text tool
The text tool uses AI to answer questions on the basis of texts from the corpus of the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI). Before an answer is shown, every Arabic quotation in it is checked against the original text. If a quotation does not match, the answer is discarded and not shown. The rule is to reject rather than to guess.
The text index currently covers a selection of works, not the whole corpus. OpenITI texts are published under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.
What these tools do not do
Both tools are philological and documentary aids. They show where a text stands, not whether it is authoritative. In line with the Initiative's guardrails, they offer:
- no fatwas and no religious legal rulings;
- no interpretation and no theological assessment of texts;
- no copies of digitised manuscripts.
How to read a result: if a passage is not found, that means only that it was not found in the given edition at the given place. It is not a judgement on the authenticity of a text. A verified quotation confirms its wording, not the way the answer reads it.
Neither tool replaces the judgement of scholars. The limits that apply to religious content are set out in the Charter.
Planned: an open checking routine
Planned An open checking routine for the Citation Fidelity Standard.
The routine is meant to let any operator measure citation fidelity with their own model on their own infrastructure. It asks two questions: does a system quote its source word for word, and does it attribute to a source only what the source contains? It is to be published together with a test set and a description of the method.
The routine measures citation fidelity alone and never judges whether a religious ruling is correct. The Initiative measures systems run by others only with their operators' consent, and results are not turned into rankings of countries.
It is intended to be released under an open licence (Apache License 2.0). Once published, it will be listed here with its version and licence.