How to read an evidence grade

Every substantive claim on this site carries a letter from A to E. It is worth thirty seconds to learn what they mean, because the letters are doing the work that a heritage site usually leaves to the reader’s trust Ninglekhu/ku heritage documentation project 2026 C.

• A — primary documentary. A census table, a statute, a gazette notice, an official notification. The thing itself.
• B — peer-reviewed scholarship. A journal article, a monograph, a doctoral dissertation.
• C — institutional or community publication. A government agency’s web page, an organisation’s own account, a national newspaper.
• D — twentieth-century Kirat historiography. Above all Iman Singh Chemjong: the foundation of modern Limbu self-knowledge, and a source historians now read as evidence for the history of Limbu nationalism rather than as a settled account of the ancient past.
• E — oral tradition and uncurated compilation. Mundhum narrative, community thar lists, heritage blogs.

Grade E is not a synonym for “false.” A Mundhum narrative is authoritative testimony about what the community holds to be true, and for most of Limbu religious and moral life it is the only source there is. What the grade records is the kind of claim a source can carry: a grade-E source can establish that a story is told; it cannot establish that an event occurred. Both are worth publishing — but not in the same typeface.

Two rules follow. Repetition never promotes a claim: forty websites saying the same thing, none citing a document, is still grade E. And where sources disagree, this site prints both positions with attribution rather than picking the tidier one.

The full key is on How we know what we know, and every grade chip on the site links to it. If you think a claim here is graded too generously — or too meanly — tell us; that is a correction like any other, and it gets a dated entry.