Editorial Standards

These are the standards every piece on Sidhe Wolf is held to. They exist because folklore is unusually easy to get wrong in confident-sounding ways, and because “it’s just old stories” is not a licence to be careless. Old stories belong to people. We keep them properly or we do not publish them.

Sourcing comes first

No claim of substance appears without a source we can point to. For the full method, see our Sourcing & Attestation policy; in brief, every piece names the specific tradition a story comes from, dates the earliest attestation we can find, distinguishes later additions from older material, and names the translation quoted. Where a claim is contested among scholars, we say so. Where we do not know, we write “we don’t know” rather than guessing in an authoritative voice.

We prefer primary texts and peer-reviewed scholarship to tertiary summaries, and we prefer scholarship from within the relevant tradition wherever it exists. Wikipedia and general reference sites can be a starting point for finding sources; they are not themselves a source we will cite as authority.

Accuracy and the failure modes we watch for

Certain errors recur so often in popular folklore writing that we treat them as red flags to be checked before publication:

• The false-ancient. A modern invention — a coinage, a “tradition,” a correspondence table — presented as if it were Iron Age or medieval. If we cannot attest it before, say, the nineteenth or twentieth century, we date it to when it actually appears.
• The pan-Celtic blur. Treating Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Manx, and sometimes Norse material as one interchangeable “Celtic” whole. We keep the traditions distinct and only cross between them with evidence.
• The Victorian overlay. Nineteenth-century Romantic and Celtic-Revival embellishment mistaken for the original story. We credit the reviver and separate their contribution from the older core.
• The single-source certainty. Building a confident claim on one translator, one collector, or one website. We corroborate.

Corrections

We will make mistakes; folklore scholarship is alive and arguments move. When we learn a piece is wrong, we fix it, and we say what we changed. Substantive corrections are noted at the foot of the article with the date and the nature of the change — we do not silently edit the record. Minor fixes (typos, broken links) may be made without a note. To flag an error, write to us via our contact page with the URL and, ideally, a source; a correction backed by a citation will always be taken seriously.

Authors and positionality

At present our work appears under the house byline, Sidhe Wolf Editorial. We do not invent named experts, credentials, or awards. As we bring on named contributors, each will carry a byline and, where the subject calls for it, a short statement of position — where they stand in relation to the material.

Positionality matters most when a writer is describing a living or practised tradition. A piece written by someone raised within a tradition, someone who has studied it academically, and someone writing about it from the outside are three different documents, and the reader deserves to know which they are reading. We ask contributors to state this plainly rather than adopt a false neutral voice. Being an outsider is not disqualifying; pretending to an authority you do not have is.

The boundary around practice

Sidhe Wolf writes about belief and practice as culture and history. It does not publish practice as instruction. Concretely:

• We describe what a rite, charm, or custom was or is, in its context, with sources. We do not write it up as a how-to for the reader to perform.
• Where material is closed or initiatory — belonging to a specific community, lineage, or living religious practice that does not consent to public instruction — we do not reproduce it as a manual, even where fragments are findable elsewhere. We may note that it exists and is closed.
• We do not present folklore as medical, psychological, legal, or financial advice, and we do not make supernatural claims of efficacy.

The line we hold is between understanding and appropriation: you should leave a Sidhe Wolf piece knowing more about a tradition, not having been handed someone else’s sacred thing to use.

Independence

Editorial decisions are ours alone. Affiliate links and any commercial relationships never determine what we cover or what we recommend, and they are always disclosed; see our affiliate disclosure. We do not accept paid guest posts, paid placements, or link insertions — our contributor guidelines explain why. On the use of software in our process, see our AI content policy: the prose and the folklore claims are human-written, full stop.