Our approach

word.wiki is an encyclopedia of the Bible for curious readers, small-group leaders, students, and anyone who wants a clear, trustworthy answer. This page explains what we believe an encyclopedia like this owes its readers, and how we try to keep that promise.

Scripture is the source

We believe the Bible is the word of God, and we write that way. Articles state what Scripture says as true: God created the heavens and the earth, Israel crossed the sea on dry ground, and Jesus rose from the dead. You won’t find “Christians believe” or “according to legend” here.

Every factual claim links to the verses it comes from. When a claim rests on something other than the text, it says so, with one of three labels:

• Tradition: what the church has long held from outside the Bible, such as who wrote a book when the book doesn’t say.
• Background: history and geography from outside the Bible, such as where a town probably stood.
• Inference: a reasonable conclusion from the text that the text doesn’t state outright.

A claim with no citation and no label doesn’t belong here, and we remove it.

Fair across traditions

We don’t take a denominational position. Our baseline is historic Christian belief as summarized in the Nicene Creed; within it, where faithful Christians read a passage differently (on baptism, the end times, church government, and much else), we describe the main readings evenly. Our reviewers come from several traditions.

We cover the 66 books of the Protestant canon. The deuterocanonical books are outside our scope, though the centuries between Malachi and Matthew still appear on our timelines as history.

The text, not theories about it

Articles describe what the text says and what it means, and when the New Testament explains an Old Testament passage, we follow it. We don’t present critical theories that set the text aside, such as late dates for prophecy or denying a book’s stated author. History, archaeology, and geography appear where they help you picture the world the Bible describes.

Dates are reconstructions. Our timelines follow one traditional chronology (Ussher’s, through the Theographic dataset), mark every date “c.”, and leave the early chapters of Genesis undated unless you ask to see the traditional dates.

Built on open data

The people, places, events, and family links come from open scholarly datasets: Theographic Bible Metadata, STEPBible’s names data from Tyndale House, OpenBible.info’s geography and cross-references, and the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge. Each page credits its sources.

Honest about AI

Articles and chapter summaries are written by an AI model (Anthropic’s Claude) from a packet of verses, data, and public-domain reference works such as Easton’s Bible Dictionary. Before anything is published:

• An automatic check confirms that every link and verse reference exists and that every claim cites something.
• A second AI pass reads each claim against the verses it cites and flags anything unsupported or miscited.
• People review the most-read articles, and anything the checks flag, before it goes live.

Every article shows its status: “Reviewed by editors” or “AI-generated, automatically checked”. Illustrations are labeled too; see about our illustrations. Articles never copy Wikipedia or modern copyrighted commentaries.

Translations

The default reading text is the Berean Standard Bible, with the King James Version and the World English Bible a click away; all three are in the public domain. Articles store verse references, not quoted text, so a quoted verse always shows in the translation you chose.

When we get something wrong

Every section has a “Suggest a correction” link. Editors read every suggestion, and an accepted correction goes into the next version of the article.