metasystema.org

Policy

Editorial policy

Every page on this site mixes two kinds of content: facts imported from the RFC Editor index and prose written by us. This page explains how we keep the line between them visible.

The RFC text is always authoritative

Nothing written here is normative. If a summary and the RFC disagree, the RFC is right and our page is a bug. Every document page links directly to the published text so you can check in one click — and you should, before implementing anything.

What is imported, what is written

  • Imported verbatim: RFC number, document ID, title, authors, publication month and year, page count, status, stream, area, keywords, obsoletes / obsoleted-by / updates / updated-by relationships, DOI, errata link, and the RFC's own abstract.
  • Written by us: the "in plain English" summary and bullet points on selected documents, all guide pages, and topic groupings. Where no hand-written summary exists, the page shows the official abstract, labelled as the abstract.

The sources page lists the upstream feed and the date of the snapshot currently loaded.

How summaries are written

  1. Read the RFC itself, not secondary coverage of it.
  2. State what the document actually specifies, in the fewest words that stay accurate — losing nuance is acceptable, changing the meaning is not.
  3. Say plainly whether it is safe to build against today, and name the document that replaced it if it is not.
  4. Keep judgement calls out unless they are widely held in the community, and flag them as judgement when included.

What we will not publish

No invented statistics, no fabricated quotes or testimonials, no claimed credentials, no AI-generated summary published without a human reading the underlying RFC, and no "recommended" status that the RFC series does not itself define.

Corrections

Report an error via the contact page. Factual errors in a document record are fixed by re-importing from the index; errors in editorial prose are rewritten and the page's "last reviewed" date is updated. Guides carry a visible published and last reviewed date so you can judge how fresh the wording is.

Independence

metasystema takes no sponsorship, runs no advertising and has no commercial relationship with any vendor whose protocols appear here. It is not affiliated with the IETF or the RFC Editor — see about.