# Seed data and its provenance

PIG ships with a roster of publicly documented people so the application is
legible on first run. It is public research, not an assertion of fact.

## Rules applied

1. **Every record carries a confidence grade and a source URL.** `confirmed`
   means two or more independent sources; `probable` means one good one;
   `unverified` means a single weak or self-reported source. The grade is shown
   in the interface wherever the record appears — a single-source claim about a
   real person must never look as solid as a corroborated one.

2. **No email addresses.** None are published by the subjects. Guessing them
   from a name and a domain is unreliable, and when a guess lands it lands on a
   real person who did not ask to be contacted.

3. **Authorship is not employment.** People named on papers or in repositories
   are recorded with the affiliation actually evidenced — `contributor`,
   `resident`, `alumni` — never promoted to `staff` to make the roster look
   fuller.

4. **"Not found" is recorded, not invented.** Where a name was supplied but
   could not be sourced, it appears in `UNRESOLVED_NAMES` with a note. Absence
   is weak evidence: a junior or deliberately non-public employee looks
   identical to a failed search.

## Known limitations

- Sourced August 2026. It will go stale — that is what `sourceUrl` is for.
- LinkedIn, Glassdoor and several job boards refuse automated fetching, so some
  records rest on search-result summaries rather than a page that was read
  end to end. Those are graded accordingly.
- One departure is recorded explicitly (a co-author who now lists a different
  company) so the roster does not quietly imply current employment.
- One name in the original brief could not be tied to the company by any source
  and is deliberately **not** seeded.

## Removing yourself

If you are seeded here and would rather not be, open an issue and the record
will be removed. Deleting a contact in the application also removes it
permanently.

## Turning it off

Seeding is a separate command and is never automatic:

```bash
npm run db:seed     # opt in
```

Skip it and PIG starts empty apart from a development user.