# About BDSMpedia

BDSMpedia is an educational reference for BDSM terms and practices. Unlike a
community wiki, content is editorially maintained rather than openly editable,
borrowing structure from encyclopedic writing: neutral tone, definitions before
nuance, and entries with a table of contents.

## How entries are written

Reference and opinion are kept apart. The [glossary](/glossary/) and
[encyclopedia](/encyclopedia/) describe: what a term means, how it is used, and
where usage disagrees with itself. [Perspectives](/perspectives/) is where
argument and personal viewpoint belong, and it is labelled as such so no one
has to guess which they are reading.

Entries lead with the plain definition and hold the nuance until after it, so a
reader who needs one line can stop at one line. Terms are defined by how the
community uses them, including the ones that rarely surface in outside writing.
Where usage is genuinely contested, the entry says so rather than picking a
winner.

Language is explicit where explicit language is the accurate kind, and entries
explain how something is done when the how is what a reader came for. Precision
is worth more here than comfort.

## Independence

BDSMpedia sells nothing, and takes nothing from anyone who does. No ads, no
sponsors, no affiliate links, no storefront, no paid placements, no accounts.
There is no third-party analytics and there are no cookies — reader preferences
stay in your browser and go nowhere else, and search runs on the site itself
rather than through an outside service.

This is structural rather than a promise. A reference funded by what it
recommends has a standing reason to recommend, and readers are right to
discount it accordingly. The durable way to be trustworthy about that is to
have nothing to gain.

Staying that way is a technical decision as much as an editorial one. The site
is a set of static files served from a CDN — no database, no application
servers, nothing that has to be kept running — which makes it fast and keeps
operating costs to roughly the price of the domain name. Nothing has to be
monetized because there is almost nothing to pay for.