The Encyclopaedia Atlantica is a work of alternate-historical
fiction. Every entry, contributor, statute, battle, and biography
presented under /atlantica/ is invented. Nothing here describes the real
world, and nothing here is evidence about it; this project shares a codebase with
Inferpedia (a real evidence-led wiki about the pre-print world) purely for engineering
convenience, and the two are kept structurally separate by design.
The premise: in this alternate timeline, the English republic that survived past 1660 under a written constitution grew into a bicoastal "Commonwealth," and by 1911 that Commonwealth's Eleventh Edition encyclopaedia — a deliberate homage to the real world's Encyclopaedia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1910–11), whose scholarly ambition and prose register this project imitates — is being scanned entry by entry by a modern digitization project. Scanned entries are transcribed in full, in the voice and knowledge horizon of 1911; every other registered entry shows only its title, volume, and page, with the line "This entry has not yet been scanned." That incompleteness is the point: a fabricated archive with fabricated gaps, the mirror image of Inferpedia's real archive with real gaps.
The invented history, contributor voices, and editorial biases are fixed in a canon
document kept in this repository's source control:
docs/ATLANTICA_CANON_20260705.md. Every scanned entry traces its structural
claims to that document (or to a append-only accretions register for bottom-up detail),
and a mechanical test suite checks cross-references, invented dates, and a banned-word
list against it.