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A Welsh-language version of this page is being prepared during the Tuesday tutor session (week of 2026-05-19). Until then, the Welsh-language version of the site shows the placeholder.

For curators

A curator is a person who is responsible for what enters and leaves the canonical record in an Awen Weave instance. Curators are the humans whose judgement the system serves. Without curators, Awen Weave is just infrastructure; with curators, it becomes a useful working discipline.

What a curator does

The day-to-day work of a curator falls into a few recognisable shapes:

Reviewing proposals. Any change to canonical state — a new claim about a building, a new entity, a correction to an existing record — arrives as a proposal in a queue. The curator reads the proposal, checks the evidence cited, considers the confidence and the source, and decides: accept, reject, or flag for further review. The proposal queue is the curator's primary daily surface.

Resolving contradictions. Awen Weave treats contradictions as first-class; competing claims about the same subject coexist. When contradictions matter — when downstream consumers need a canonical answer — the curator examines the competing claims, considers the sources behind each, and decides which (if any) to mark as the canonical view. The reasoning is recorded; the rejected claims are not deleted, just not chosen.

Field verification. Some work cannot be done at a screen. Walking the streets, checking that the recorded address matches the building that stands at that point, that the listed status reads correctly on the brass plate, that the building photographed in the historic record still exists — this is the curator's most embodied work. Tools like Lleolydd support field-based correction with co-signed verification from other curators present in the same field session.

Caring for sources. Sources are first-class entities in Awen Weave. Curators are responsible for which sources are trusted, what visibility each source has, when a source should be retired, and whether a contested claim's source still warrants its current weight. Provenance discipline is a curator's discipline.

What a curator is not

A curator is not a moderator. The job is not to enforce a community standard or filter for acceptability — it is to make honest judgements about what is true, what is plausible, what is unknown, and what is contested.

A curator is not a programmer. While Awen Weave is built from code, the curator's surfaces are designed to require no programming. The work is judgement, not engineering.

A curator is not a final authority. Awen Weave's no-self-acceptance principle means that mutations to canonical state require a second curator's review. No single curator's judgement is the final word on anything. The pattern protects against any one person's blind spots by requiring at least one other pair of eyes.

Becoming a curator

Curatorship is granted by the instance's operating community. For the Dolgellau Town Dataset, the operating community is Arloesi Dolgellau. Becoming a curator is a conversation with the community about commitment, capability, and trust.

The first commitment a new curator makes is to the constitutional principles: contracts are the source of obligation; humans are the source of judgement; learning remains advisory. These are not slogans; they shape every decision the curator makes.

The capability commitment is to learn the proposal-review discipline, the field-verification practice, and the sources-care work. These take time; new curators are paired with experienced curators until the rhythm is internalised.

The trust commitment is to act in the interests of the community and the canonical record, not in personal interest. A curator who owns a building they curate must be honest about that conflict; self-acceptance is forbidden at the system level for exactly this reason.

Working with the discipline

Curatorship is a craft. Like any craft, it benefits from practice, mentorship, and clarity about what excellence looks like. Awen Weave's constitutional principles give curators a stable foundation; the proposal queue and Prawf log give them a clear record of what has been done; the bilingual content discipline (Welsh + English) and the North Wales dialect register (for Welsh-language work in instances like Dolgellau) give them a coherent voice to use.

The work is patient. A single building's history can take weeks to weave together honestly from multiple sources. The pattern does not reward haste. The pattern rewards care.

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