Why This Page Carries Extra Weight
This site does not attribute its content to a named writer or editor, and it does not intend to. Its records document real, living, named people, which means the accuracy and fairness of every sentence matters more than it would for a site about a product or a hobby, and it means the ordinary way a reader checks a source — looking up who wrote it — is not available here. In place of a byline, this page sets out exactly how a record qualifies for inclusion, where its facts come from, how those facts are checked, what is deliberately left out, and what happens when something is wrong. Every claim in that description is meant to be checkable against the records themselves, not taken on trust.
Inclusion Criteria
A person is documented on this site only if they have a substantial, self-published professional presence of one of these kinds: an employer or institutional biography page (a hospital, company, law firm, or comparable organization publishing its own description of the person's role); an official faculty or academic profile maintained by a university or medical school; or a licensing or credentialing record, such as a National Provider Identifier (NPI) registry entry for a clinician or a state bar admission record for an attorney. A social media profile, a personal networking-site listing with no employer confirmation, or a bare mention in a directory does not qualify on its own, no matter how many of them exist. This standard is applied the same way regardless of how prominent, interesting, or search-relevant a person might otherwise be — a person with high search volume around their name but no institutional or licensing source of the kind described above is not included, and a person with comparatively low search volume but a solid institutional source is.
This standard is also why the number of people documented in any one location or field is often smaller than the number of people who could plausibly be found online under the name. Research for this site's Austin coverage, for example, identified several additional people named John Kim connected to the area whose only public presence was a personal networking profile or a self-published lifestyle page; none of them met the standard above, and none is documented.
Sourcing Standard
Every fact on this site traces to a primary source: the subject's own employer or institutional bio, an official faculty page, a licensing or credentialing registry (such as the federal NPPES/NPI registry or a state bar directory), a public company's SEC filing, or an official studio or publisher page. Commercial aggregator sites — including physician-directory platforms, professional-networking sites, and entertainment-database sites — are useful for finding a lead during research, and some of the exclusions described above were only discovered by checking one, but none of them is ever cited as the source for a fact reported here. If a fact could only be confirmed through an aggregator and not through a primary source, it is either hedged explicitly in the text or omitted, and the aggregator is never listed as a source.
Where two primary sources disagree with each other — for example, two institutional listings giving different hospital affiliations for the same physician — this site reports that the sources disagree rather than picking one arbitrarily or averaging them into a fabricated middle answer.
What Is Deliberately Excluded
This site reports professional and public-work facts only: field, credentials, employer, role, career history, education, and published works or professional appointments. It does not report, discuss, or imply anything about a documented person's personal life, including health or medical information, personal finances, family, marriage, or relationships. It does not report religion, except in the narrow case where religious office is itself the documented profession, as with clergy. It does not report politics. It reports no personal identifiers — no dates of birth, no ages, no home addresses, no personal contact information — and a birth year appears only in the rare case where it is published directly in the subject's own professional or institutional bio.
This site also does not rate, rank, or compare the people it documents against one another or against anyone else. It does not describe any person as the most prominent, most successful, top, leading, renowned, or distinguished John Kim, and it applies no star ratings, awards lists, or comparative judgment of any kind to a named individual. Records are presented independently of one another, each on its own facts.
How Records Are Verified
Each fact is checked against the specific authority appropriate to it. A clinician's specialty, credentials, and practice location are checked against their institutional bio and, where available, the federal NPPES registry entry under their NPI. An attorney's admission and practice area are checked against their firm's own attorney profile. A public company executive's role and history are checked against the company's own investor-relations materials and, where relevant, its SEC filings. A clergy member's parish and title are checked against the diocese's own clergy directory and the parish's own staff listing. In every case, the goal is to confirm the fact against the organization that would actually know it — the employer, the licensing body, or the regulator — rather than against a third party's compilation of it.
How Uncertainty Is Handled
Not every fact worth mentioning is fully verifiable. When a detail is plausible, reported somewhere, but not confirmed against a primary source, this site either states the hedge explicitly in the prose — for example, noting that a fact comes from the subject's own practice website rather than an institutional page, or that a reported career move could not be dated with certainty — or leaves the detail out entirely rather than presenting it as settled. This site does not invent a date, a degree, a credential, or a number to fill a gap, and it does not smooth over a disagreement between sources by silently choosing one. Some records on this site are, as a result, short — occasionally just a few sentences — because that is the full extent of what a primary source actually establishes. A short record reflects the limits of the public record, not a lower standard of effort.
Review and Correction
Facts change. A person moves employers, a company restructures, a clergy assignment ends. Records describing situations that are more likely to change quickly — a recent corporate leadership change, for instance — are treated as more time-sensitive and are candidates for more frequent re-checking against their primary source. This site does not claim that every record reflects the present moment with certainty; it claims that every record reflected a verifiable primary source as of the point it was checked, and that any known volatility is flagged in the record itself rather than hidden.
Requesting a Correction or Removal
Anyone documented on this site, or anyone who notices an inaccuracy in a record, can request a correction or removal. The full process, including the contact address and the expected response time, is described on the removal request page.
Governing documents and machine-readable data
The standards on this page describe how records are built. Four further documents set out the terms under which the material is published, and each is worth reading before relying on anything here.
The disclaimer is the most important of them. It states plainly what these records are and are not: a compilation of published professional facts, not a background check, not a consumer report, and expressly not intended or authorized for any use covered by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Anyone considering this material in connection with employment, credit, insurance, housing or tenant screening should stop and read it first.
The terms of use cover permitted use of the reference material, including the distinction between ordinary attributed quotation, which is permitted, and wholesale republication of the records, which is not. The privacy policy describes what this site collects, which is very little: no accounts, no advertising, no tracking beyond standard server logs.
For automated consumers, the site also publishes an EntityMap to the entitymap.org v1.0 specification. It declares every entity documented here in structured form and links each to a canonical external reference where one exists. That matters for a disambiguation resource in particular: a machine reading this site should be able to tell that the people described are distinct individuals rather than one person with a confusing record, and the EntityMap states that explicitly rather than leaving it to be inferred.