The Magic of Oz

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

What each claim rests on

Every one of the 7,104 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:

EvidenceClaimsShareWhat it means
Quoted from the text 5,943 84% The sentence that states the claim is stored with it, and re-checked against the book on every build.
Named in the chapter cited 1,153 16% The name occurs in that chapter, but no sentence has been attached that states the claim itself.
Not yet confirmed 8 0% Asserted while the graph was being built, and still waiting on a sentence.

6,878 of 7,104 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.

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.