My wiki:Taxonomy

This page is the reference for how Bullshitopedia classifies entries. The full rationale is in the Bullshitopedia Taxonomy V1 document.

Every claim entry is classified on three independent facets, plus a separate verdict field:

Facet	Question it answers	Values	Per entry
Domain	What is the claim about?	10	exactly one
Tactic	How does it deceive?	10	one to three
Era	When?	2	exactly one
Evidence status	What did we conclude?	9	exactly one (a field, not a category)

Editors never type these categories by hand. Fill in the parameters of {{Claim}}

at the top of an entry and the template files the page into the right categories. A misspelled value is caught and the page is listed in Category:Pages with invalid taxonomy values.

Domain

Politics & Elections: Government, voting, campaigns and public policy: election-fraud claims, fabricated statements by officials, doctored polling data.
Health & Medicine: Medical claims, public health and the body: fake cures, anti-vaccine claims, miracle-diet hoaxes, misattributed medical studies.
Science & Environment: The natural world, climate and technology's effects: climate-denial talking points, junk-science claims, misrepresented research.
History: Past events, historical figures and revisionism: fabricated historical quotes, invented events, distorted war narratives.
Business, Finance & Scams: Money, markets and commerce: Ponzi schemes, fake investment opportunities, corporate hoaxes, counterfeit-product scares.
Technology & Media: Digital claims, AI and the internet itself: deepfakes, AI-generated hoaxes, viral fabricated screenshots, urban legends about tech.
Crime & Public Safety: Danger, law enforcement and moral panics: stranger-danger myths, fabricated crime waves, hoaxed public-safety alerts.
Culture, Religion & Society: Belief, identity, celebrity and social life: religious hoaxes, celebrity death or scandal hoaxes, cultural myths and folklore.
Education & Learning: Learning, teaching, credentials and the institutions of education: neuromyths and miracle learning methods, diploma mills and fabricated degrees, admissions and testing fraud, manipulated rankings and statistics, and overhyped education products and for-profit colleges. A claim belongs here when the deception is about how people learn or what an education is worth; brain science with no learning claim belongs in Science & Environment, and school-policy fights in campaigns belong in Politics & Elections.
Sports & Competition: Athletic performance, competition integrity, athletes and the sports business, including esports and mind sports: doping and its denial, match-fixing and betting scandals, corrupt officiating and governance, fabricated ages and records, performance-product pseudoscience and popular sports myths. Medical claims about an athlete belong in Health & Medicine unless they concern competition, such as doping or eligibility; betting scams aimed at the public belong in Business, Finance & Scams unless they involve fixing results.

Tactic

Fabrication: Entirely invented content presented as real. (Wardle / First Draft: fabricated content)
Manipulation: Genuine media, data or documents altered to deceive. Includes deepfakes. (Wardle / First Draft: manipulated content)
Imposture: Content or a source posing as something legitimate it isn't. (Wardle / First Draft: imposter content)
False Context: True content or an authentic image paired with false framing, or a false connection between a headline or caption and the substance. (Wardle / First Draft: false context + false connection)
Statistical & Evidentiary Distortion: Cherry-picked statistics, misleading charts, or unrepresentative studies presented as conclusive. (Extension of Wardle's misleading content, narrowed to data and evidence)
Propaganda Technique: Persuasion that substitutes emotion or identity for evidence: name-calling, glittering generalities, transfer, testimonial, plain folks, card stacking, bandwagon. Includes astroturfing. (Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1937)
Pseudoscience / Junk Science: Claims dressed in scientific language or method but unsupported by it. (Bullshitopedia extension)
Fraud or Scam: Deception undertaken for direct financial or material gain. (Bullshitopedia extension)
Conspiracy Theory: A narrative alleging hidden coordination that explains events, structured to resist falsification. (Bullshitopedia extension)
Satire or Parody: Content with no deceptive intent that nonetheless spreads as if factual. Kept separate because intent differs fundamentally from the other nine. (Wardle / First Draft: satire or parody)

Add a new tactic only when three or more entries would use it.

Era

Historical: The claim predates mass internet adoption (pre-1995 as a working cutoff) and spread through print, broadcast or word of mouth.
Current: The claim originated or is actively spreading in the internet and social-media era.

Evidence status

Evidence status is recorded in the status parameter of {{Claim}}

and is not a category, because verdicts change as evidence develops while domain and tactic almost never do. Allowed values: False, Misleading, Unsupported, Manipulated media, Outdated, Disputed, Unverified, Satire or parody, Corrected.

"Satire or parody" appears both as a Tactic (what the original content was) and as a Status (how the entry is ultimately labeled). The overlap is intentional.

Library

Books and other reference works live in the separate Library: namespace and use {{Book}} . They share the Domain and Tactic vocabulary but are filed into parallel Library – categories, so category listings of claims stay clean. See Library:Bibliography of Bullshit.

Sources

Wardle, C. First Draft. Understanding Information Disorder: the seven types of mis- and disinformation.
Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1937–38). The seven propaganda techniques.
PolitiFact and Snopes, reviewed for topical categorization conventions.
Tandoc, E., Lim, Z., & Ling, R. (2018). "Defining 'Fake News'." Digital Journalism.