A dictionary is only useful if you can tell how much to trust a given entry. This page states the rules the lexicon follows, so that a reader — human or machine — can judge an entry instead of merely believing it.
The model we borrowed
The structure comes from Wikidata, the multilingual knowledge base behind Wikipedia. Wikidata separates identity from description: every concept gets a permanent identifier, a short disambiguating description, per-language labels and aliases, and sourced statements. We keep that separation and add the one thing a general knowledge base cannot supply — an operational definition written for practitioners.
- One concept, one URL. Variant spellings and synonyms resolve to the same entry rather than competing with it.
- A permanent identifier. The SSD number never changes, even if the page title or URL does.
- One definition sentence. Written to survive being quoted alone, without the surrounding page.
- Per-language canonical terms. English and 繁體中文 sit on the same entry, because the concept is not owned by either language.
- A Wikidata anchor where one exists. So a machine can distinguish this concept from a different thing with the same name.
Status values
Wikidata ranks statements by how much weight to give them. We apply the same idea to vocabulary, because the most common failure in SEO writing is presenting a contested term as if it were settled.
- Stable — the meaning is settled and has been for years. Safe to build on without qualification.
- Emerging — in real use, but still changing shape. Cite with the date attached.
- Contested — used in incompatible ways by different parties. Never cite without naming which sense you mean.
- Deprecated — obsolete, or a vendor metric dressed as an industry standard.
What counts as a source
In order of preference: the operator’s own documentation or specification; a ratified standard; the Wikidata item, for identity only; then peer-reviewed or primary research. Vendor blogs are used only to establish what a vendor’s product does, never to establish what a term means. Where no authority exists — and for several terms in this lexicon none does — the entry says so plainly rather than manufacturing one.
Versioning
Each entry carries a version and a review date. A material change to a definition increments the version; the identifier stays fixed so that citations remain resolvable. Silent edits to a definition are not permitted — if a definition was wrong, the correction is visible in the version history.
What this lexicon is not
- Not a tutorial. Entries define; they do not teach a method.
- Not a ranking of tools. No vendor is recommended, and no metric invented by a vendor is presented as a standard.
- Not exhaustive. Twenty terms is a starting core, not a complete vocabulary. Entries are added when a term is either widely used and poorly defined, or newly used and likely to be misread.
Corrections
If an entry is wrong, imprecise, or missing a sense that practitioners actually use, it should be corrected rather than worked around. Each entry lists its sources and its review date so that a correction can be argued from evidence.