How we vet entries

Anyone with an account can submit a directory entry, news story, app, or homage tribute. Each form collects only what's needed to verify and publish — name, slug, summary, location (where relevant), and any links the submitter wants associated.

• Free for community contributors
• Required: a verifiable web presence or in-person address
• Optional: socials, photos, founder bio, year founded

Before anything lands in the moderator queue we run automated screens to catch the obvious issues fast.

• Spam + abuse moderation via Anthropic's Claude — text submissions get scored against a rubric and rejected if confirmed abuse
• Duplicate detection on slug + name within each kind (business / person / landmark / etc.)
• Required-field validation (Black-ownership disclosure, contact, jurisdiction)
• Public-records pulls where applicable: state business registry, IRS 501(c)(3) tables, SAM.gov entity status, BBB profile

black.wiki doesn't gatekeep by who you are — that wouldn't be legal and it isn't what we're trying to do. We gatekeep by whether the entry advances our mission: empowering Black excellence. The question on every submission isn't "who owns this?" — it's "does this strengthen the visibility, archive, or infrastructure of Black history, culture, business, or community?"

• Black-owned or Black-led businesses, organizations, and projects — the most common fit, because their existence is itself an answer to the mission
• Notable Black individuals: founders, artists, athletes, scholars, civic leaders, performers, inventors, and the working professionals behind the scenes
• Cultural landmarks — HBCUs, churches, museums, memorials, historic neighborhoods, sites tied to Black history
• Programs and initiatives that meaningfully serve Black communities — scholarships, apprenticeships, mutual-aid networks, advocacy orgs — regardless of who runs them, as long as the impact is measurable and on-mission
• Historical events, movements, and cultural artifacts: the long story, not just present-day commerce
• What doesn't fit: generic businesses with no connection to the mission, listings whose only Black angle is marketing copy, content that uses Blackness as window-dressing for an unrelated agenda
• Edge cases are documented in the moderator handbook and decided case-by-case — moderators err toward inclusion when the mission connection is real, and toward exclusion when it isn't

Once ownership clears, we read the actual content of the entry against its primary source. We're not running a press-release wire — submissions have to be accurate.

• Founding year + location are cross-checked against state business registries, Wikipedia, the company's own About page, or LinkedIn
• Notable claims ("first Black-owned X," award wins, revenue figures, customer counts) require a public citation. If we can't find one, the claim gets cut before publish
• For people: bio facts (birth year, education, awards, affiliations) cross-checked against at least two independent sources. Historical figures: encyclopedic + academic sources
• For Black History stories: each chapter's date has to map to a real event in the historical record. Story drafts that mix dates, conflate people, or repeat debunked claims are rejected
• Quotes attributed to a person require either an audio/video clip, a transcript from a named outlet, or a citation in a book / archive
• AI-assisted drafts (from /admin/compose) carry an extra round of source review — we don't ship hallucinated bios
• Links to external sources are stored on the entry and shown on its public detail page when we keep them in moderator notes

Every entry is read by a real person — an admin, ambassador, or community moderator — before it goes live. We're looking for accuracy, mission fit, and tone, not just compliance.

• Fact-check the summary against the cited source
• Confirm category + location are correct
• Edit copy for clarity if the submitter is okay with it
• Reject obvious misuse: spam, hate, scams, listings with no mission connection, anything using Black culture as window-dressing

After publish, entries can earn extra verification flags that show up as badges on their detail page.

• ✓ Verified — claimed and reviewed by the owner or a moderator with primary-source confirmation
• 🏛️ Registered — matched to an active state business registry
• 🏦 501(c)(3) — confirmed against the IRS exempt-org list
• 🛡️ BBB — has a Better Business Bureau profile we link to
• Stale badges automatically drop after 365 days until they're re-verified

Listings don't get to coast. Anyone can flag an entry; once an entry hits three open flags it auto-hides pending re-review.

• Report button on every detail page
• Three flags = auto-hide until a moderator clears or removes the entry
• Verification badges are re-checked on a rolling schedule against public records
• Owners can update their entry any time; non-trivial edits go back through the queue