Sources & licenses
Where every pill comes from.
Sources provide the facts. We only do the writing, and we always say where a fact came from.
How a pill is made
- We start from open, trusted sources: encyclopedias, museum collections, space agencies and dictionaries.
- A pill is drafted with the help of AI, only from the source's own text. It never adds facts from memory.
- Two separate checks compare every claim with the source. If a claim isn't supported, the pill doesn't go out.
- Every pill links to its source, and to the exact version we read.
- If we learn a pill was wrong or out of date, we retire it.
The sources we use
Each pill shows its own sources and licences. These are the collections we draw from today.
| Source | Licence | What we use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Surprising facts in every topic |
| Wiktionary | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Word origins |
| Wikidata | CC0 1.0 | Exact figures about places |
| NASA | Public domain | Space and Earth science |
| NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day | Varies, see each pill | Astronomy pictures of the day |
| Library of Congress | Public domain | American history |
| National Park Service | Public domain | Parks, places and their stories |
| Smithsonian Open Access | CC0 1.0 | History, science and culture |
| The Metropolitan Museum of Art | CC0 1.0 | Art and objects across history |
| Cleveland Museum of Art | CC0 1.0 | Art and objects across history |
| Art Institute of Chicago | CC BY 4.0 | Art and the stories behind it |
| Europeana | CC0 1.0 | European cultural heritage |
Credit and licences
Facts can't be owned, so we write every pill in our own words. We still credit every source by name, with a link, and follow its licence. Where a pill is adapted from a source under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence, like Wikipedia, the pill text is shared under the same licence.
Fonts
This website uses Newsreader and Geist, both under the SIL Open Font License.
Spotted a mistake?
Tell us, and thank you. We check it against the source and fix or retire the pill.