Decisions and assumptions
Every choice SeferGraph makes, written down: its value, who set it, when, and what would change it.
Every result SeferGraph gives rests on choices: how a date is counted, what counts as a match, what counts as a witness. Each choice is written down here as a named assumption — its value, who set it, when, what it rests on, and what would change it. A decision is an assumption whose value was set. Changing one forks the results; it never rewrites them.
How decisions are made: First principles and pragmatism — not academic-first and not Torah-scholarship-first; both are inputs, cited side by side. Every decision here is the owner's working opinion and is, by definition, always subservient to Daas Torah. (D-0000)
Sorted by who set each value, so it is plain how much rests on rulings and how much on guesses.
Ruled by the owner
| decision | value | set | |
|---|---|---|---|
| D-0001 | The Hebrew year is primary | The Hebrew year, counted from creation. The secular year is shown beside it as a common alternative. | 20 Tishrei 5787 · 2026-10-01 12:42 |
| D-0002 | Seder Olam is the primary count | Seder Olam is primary. The historians' count is stored beside it as a second value — never discarded — and every check flags where the … | 20 Tishrei 5787 · 2026-10-01 12:53 |
| D-0003 | A book's birth — said, or written? | Both dates are stored, and the date it was written is the book's primary date; the date it was said stays beside it. | 20 Tishrei 5787 · 2026-10-01 13:11 |
| D-0004 | Record first, trust later | Recording comes first. A vocabulary for everything that can be recorded deterministically; then one for everything implicit; consistent … | 19 Tishrei 5787 (night) · 2026-09-29 21:05 |
| D-0005 | Tanach first, the Chumash as the first layer | With Tanach, and within it the Chumash as the first layer everything else hangs on — keeping upstream and downstream in view. | 19 Tishrei 5787 (night) · 2026-09-29 22:32 |
| D-0006 | Shaped by walking through real use | By walking through how the owner actually uses it, one step at a time, and improving after each walk — slowly and securely — rather than … | 19 Tishrei 5787 · 2026-09-30 12:07 |
| D-0007 | Where the dates of the later books come from | Sefaria's recorded composition range for the book, converted to Hebrew years, with Sefaria named as the source. A book with no recorded … | 20 Tishrei 5787 · 2026-10-01 13:15 |
| D-0008 | When one book counts as before another | Only when B's whole window ends before A's window begins. When the windows overlap, the time check says "the dates cannot tell" and … | 20 Tishrei 5787 · 2026-10-01 13:18 |
| D-0009 | The Zohar's date | Tradition's date is primary — Rashbi and his talmidim, ~3880–3920. The academic date (R' Moshe de Leon and his circle, ~5040–5060) is … | 20 Tishrei 5787 · 2026-10-01 13:21 |
| D-0010 | When a run of words counts as found | Rare enough, not long enough. A run counts as found when its exact words appear in only a handful of places in the whole library, and … | 20 Tishrei 5787 · 2026-10-01 13:27 |
| D-0011 | What counts as the same word | Two levels, and every match says which it reached. Nikud, te'amim, punctuation and final letters are always set aside. First, letter for … | 20 Tishrei 5787 · 2026-10-01 13:22 |
| D-0016 | The experiments section is called SeferLab | SeferLab, at /docs/lab. | 20 Tishrei 5787 · 2026-10-01 13:23 |
The machine's guess — not yet ruled
| decision | value | set | |
|---|---|---|---|
| D-0012 | How far "elsewhere" looks | The 100 closest passages by full-text search, over all 4.25 million segments. | 20 Tishrei 5787 · 2026-10-01 04:45 |
| D-0013 | The cited book wins a tie | The book the citation named — the nearest place to the address given. | 20 Tishrei 5787 · 2026-10-01 12:15 |
| D-0014 | Which source is "primary" | A hand-made list — Tanach, Mishnah, Gemara, the Rambam's Mishneh Torah, the Tur, the Shulchan Aruch and its main commentaries — ahead of … | 20 Tishrei 5787 · 2026-10-01 12:15 |
| D-0015 | What "שם" points to | The place of the citation just before it. | 20 Tishrei 5787 · 2026-10-01 04:45 |
Generated from the register in the SeferGraph repository (docs/decisions/) by tools/build_decisions.py.