How this site is made
This site makes several thousand small claims about the Land of Oz, and it would rather show you how it knows each one than ask you to take them on trust.
Everything below is counted from the compiled corpus each time the site is rebuilt. Nothing here is typed by hand, so nothing here can quietly stop being true.
What is on the site
- 25 books, 559 chapters, read in full
- 1,109 entries — 664 characters, 287 places, 158 treasures
- 8,680 cited claims about them
- 598 passages quoted under As the books describe them
- 13 places where the books contradict each other, shown rather than settled
What each claim rests on
Every one of the 8,680 claims above names a book and a chapter — that is enforced when the site is compiled, and a claim without a source fails the build rather than being published. What differs is the evidence behind the claim, and this is the whole of it:
| Evidence | Claims | Share | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quoted from the text | 5,791 | 67% | The sentence that states the claim is stored with it, and re-checked against the book on every build. |
| Named in the chapter cited | 2,806 | 32% | The name occurs in that chapter, but no sentence has been attached that states the claim itself. |
| Not yet confirmed | 76 | 1% | Recorded by the extraction pass with nothing yet to show for it. |
| Not yet confirmed | 7 | 0% | Asserted while the graph was being built, and still waiting on a sentence. |
8,457 of 8,680 claims — 97% — store the sentence they rest on. Every one of those sentences is compared against the book again on each rebuild, and a quotation that no longer matches the text is dropped rather than published. That check is the reason the number moves: it is recomputed, not maintained.
Where the pictures come from
The plates on the character, treasure and place pages are painted from what this site records, not from anyone's memory of Oz. Every one was described to the illustrator out of the attributes and quoted passages read out of the twenty-five books — 2,236 of them stand behind the 680 plates here. The Sawhorse is drawn as carpentry because The Marvelous Land of Oz says its legs are four sticks driven into holes bored in a log; the Glass Cat shows pink brains and a ruby heart through clear glass because The Patchwork Girl of Oz says so. Nothing is taken from the 1939 film, which is not one of the books and does not agree with them.
They are still pictures. A plate is the one thing on this site that cannot show you a sentence, because it is an illustration made from the claims rather than a claim itself — and the pictures are machine-painted, so a plate can be wrong in ways a quotation cannot. Where a plate and a chapter disagree, the chapter is right. Read the citations, not the pictures.
What the numbers do not tell you
A high share of quoted claims means the site can show its working. It does not mean the reading is right. The extraction is done partly by machine, and a machine can attach a real sentence to the wrong entity, run two characters together on a shared name, or take a description of one thing for another. The quotation proves the sentence exists in that chapter. It does not prove the claim drawn from it is sound.
That is why the site quotes rather than paraphrases wherever it can: a reader who can see the sentence can judge the inference, and can tell us when it is wrong.