Data sources

Where the data comes from, how often it is refreshed, exactly which fields are taken — and an explicit list of the things this site does not do.

Method

The site is assembled by a pipeline that runs on a schedule, not by hand. Each run calls the published interfaces of a small number of open datasets, records the fields listed below against the record they came from, and rebuilds the static pages from that structured data. Nothing is fetched at page-view time: a reader's browser requests a finished HTML file and nothing else, which means no third-party request is made on the reader's behalf and no reader data leaves the page.

Every field kept has a stated origin, and every field discarded is listed as deliberately not taken. If a value cannot be sourced to a record, it is not published.

Refresh cadence

Dataset	Refresh	Interface
Wikidata	Weekly	https://query.wikidata.org/sparql
Wikimedia Commons	Weekly (metadata); images are fetched once and re-checked monthly for licence changes	https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php (action=query, generator=categorymembers, prop=imageinfo, iiprop=url\|size\|mime\|extmetadata)
Wikipedia (English)	Monthly, and only for pages already referenced by an ingested record	https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php (action=query, prop=extracts, exintro, explaintext, exlimit=1) and https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/{title}
MusicBrainz	Weekly, at most, and only for identifiers already in the catalogue	https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/
MONOGRAPH original content	Rebuilt with every pipeline run; only files whose content hash changed are ever uploaded	—

Dataset by dataset

Wikidata

The skeleton of a specimen record: what a thing is, what class it belongs to, who made it, when it appeared, and which Commons category holds its photographs.

Licence: CC0 1.0 Universal (Public Domain Dedication)
Licence text
Endpoint: https://query.wikidata.org/sparql
Protocol: SPARQL 1.1 over HTTPS, JSON results; https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php for entity lookups
Refresh: Weekly
Access rules: Descriptive User-Agent with a contact route. Requests are serialised; the query service asks for no more than one concurrent query per client and MONOGRAPH holds to that.
Fields taken: entity identifier (QID) and label

aliases and language variants of the label

instance-of class (electric guitar, acoustic guitar, effects unit, amplifier, part)

manufacturer (P176), brand (P171), country of origin (P495)

inception or production start (P571), discontinuation (P2669)

material (P186), colour (P462), mass (P2067), length and dimension statements with their units

part of the series (P179), follows (P155), followed by (P156)

Commons image reference (P18) and Commons category (P373) — used as a pointer only, never as a licence grant
Deliberately not taken: Statements with no reference and no plausible source, unless they are the only record of the entity and are marked as unreferenced

User talk pages, edit history, and any personal data
Attribution: CC0 imposes no attribution condition. MONOGRAPH still credits Wikidata and the Wikidata QID on every record derived from it, because provenance is useful to the reader and makes corrections possible.

Wikimedia Commons

Photographs of instruments, hardware, and components. Every one carries its credit line and licence on the page that shows it.

Licence: Per file: Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), CC0, or Public Domain
Licence text
Endpoint: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php (action=query, generator=categorymembers, prop=imageinfo, iiprop=url|size|mime|extmetadata)
Protocol: MediaWiki Action API over HTTPS, JSON; thumbnail URLs are derived, source files are linked
Refresh: Weekly (metadata); images are fetched once and re-checked monthly for licence changes
Access rules: Descriptive User-Agent per Wikimedia policy, serialised requests, no parallel hammering of upload.wikimedia.org. Thumbnails are requested, not originals.
Fields taken: file title and canonical file page URL

artist / author (extmetadata Artist), credit line (Credit), and any machine-readable attribution requirement flag

licence short name, licence URL, and usage terms (LicenseShortName, LicenseUrl, UsageTerms)

capture date (DateTimeOriginal), description, and the categories the file sits in

image dimensions, mime type, and thumbnail URL

public-domain status and the reason it is public domain
Deliberately not taken: Files whose licence cannot be determined from extmetadata

Files under non-free or fair-use rationales

Files under licences that forbid commercial or derivative use (a site has to assume both)

Full-resolution originals — only a sized thumbnail is used, and the original is linked
Attribution: Attribution is rendered on every page that displays an image, together with the licence name, a link to the licence text, and a link to the source file. ShareAlike applies to adaptations of the image itself (a crop or a colour adjustment we make); it does not extend to the surrounding page or to the rest of the site. Images that are CC BY or CC BY-SA are never used as site chrome, logos, or decorative branding.

Wikipedia (English)

Background and terminology: what a term means, in one or two adapted sentences, with the article linked for the reader who wants the full context.

Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0); a small number of legacy pages remain under GFDL
Licence text
Endpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php (action=query, prop=extracts, exintro, explaintext, exlimit=1) and https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/{title}
Protocol: MediaWiki Action API and REST API over HTTPS, JSON
Refresh: Monthly, and only for pages already referenced by an ingested record
Access rules: Descriptive User-Agent, serialised requests, maxlag backoff honoured, and no crawling of article bodies beyond the intro extract.
Fields taken: plain-text introductory extract (exintro, explaintext) — trimmed to the sentences that define the subject

revision id and revision timestamp, so the exact revision used can be identified later

article title and canonical article URL

categories, used only for cross-referencing, never reproduced
Deliberately not taken: In-text citations, reference lists, tables, images, infoboxes, and templates

Section bodies beyond the introduction

Anything marked as needing a citation where the claim is contested — a bare extract is not a fact we will publish
Attribution: Extracts are short — a lead sentence or a definition, not an article — and are marked as adapted. Every extract is attributed on the page to the article it came from, with a link to the article, a link to the revision it was taken from, and a link to the licence. Text we take is reformatted (wikitext markup removed, wiki-links stripped, house style applied), so it is an adaptation, and it is presented as one. The site's own prose and layout are not offered under CC BY-SA; only the adapted extract is.

MusicBrainz

Disambiguating documentation — linking a signature instrument to the release it accompanied, and to the artist record, with a stable identifier.

Licence: CC0 1.0 Universal (Public Domain Dedication) for core data
Licence text
Endpoint: https://musicbrainz.org/ws/2/
Protocol: REST over HTTPS, JSON (fmt=json)
Refresh: Weekly, at most, and only for identifiers already in the catalogue
Access rules: At or below 1 request per second, descriptive User-Agent with a contact URL, no bulk dumps re-fetched wholesale; batch lookups by MBID rather than walking the search index.
Fields taken: artist / manufacturer name records and their MBIDs

release group and release titles, and release dates, where the entity is a documented signature or reissue product

relationships between artists and instruments, where the relationship is stated by the source

disambiguation comments, so that two similarly named entities are not conflated
Deliberately not taken: Cover Art Archive images (separate licences per image)

User reviews, ratings, collections, tags, and listening statistics

Any personally identifying information about private individuals
Attribution: Core MusicBrainz data is CC0. MONOGRAPH still credits MusicBrainz and the MusicBrainz ID (MBID) on any record derived from it. Content outside core data — including the Cover Art Archive, which carries per-image licences of its own, and user reviews — is explicitly out of scope and is not ingested.

MONOGRAPH original content

Everything that is not a quotation from a named source: the derived tables, the comparisons, the structure, and the site's own writing.

Endpoint: Not applicable — computed locally from the aggregated dataset
Protocol: Local computation over structured records; no network access
Refresh: Rebuilt with every pipeline run; only files whose content hash changed are ever uploaded
Access rules: Not applicable.
Fields taken: unit conversions between imperial and metric, shown with the raw figure and the rounding used

scale-length and fret-position arithmetic, with the formula printed next to the result

gap, spacing, and thickness comparisons derived from cited dimensions

cross-references and ordering between specimens, makers, types, and decades

index, navigation, and search pages

sitemaps, feeds, robots policy, and the trust pages you are reading

editorial prose — written by hand, from the cited sources, in the site's house style
Deliberately not taken: No value is ever interpolated between cited figures to fill a gap

No specification is carried over from a similar model and presented as this model's own
Attribution: Original content is produced by the operator of this site, either written by hand or computed deterministically from the structured data described above. It is not offered under an open licence, and it is not generated by a language model: see the AI and automation policy.

What MONOGRAPH does not do

This is the part of the policy that is easiest to check, so it is stated as a list of prohibitions rather than as a promise of good behaviour.

We do not scrape or reproduce tablature, chord charts, or any other transcription of copyrighted musical works.
We do not reproduce lyrics, in any form, in any language.
We do not publish marketplace prices, stock levels, dealer inventory, or affiliate links.
We do not copy review text, blog posts, or forum posts. Where a claim rests on a review, we state the claim in our own words and link to the source rather than reproducing it.
We do not copy manufacturer or retailer marketing copy, catalogue prose, or spec-sheet phrasing. Specifications are recorded as facts (numbers, materials, dimensions), not as borrowed text.
We do not mirror full-resolution third-party images. Images taken from Wikimedia Commons are credited and linked to the source file, not re-hosted as an uncredited library.
We do not bypass paywalls, login walls, bot protection, or technical access controls, and we do not collect personal data from any source.
We do not use a language model to author specifications, model numbers, measurements, or review quotes.

How collection actually behaves

robots.txt is fetched and obeyed before any page is read; a Disallow rule removes the source from the fetch list permanently.
Published rate limits and API etiquette are honoured, not paginated around: MusicBrainz at or below 1 request/second with a descriptive User-Agent, Wikimedia APIs with a descriptive User-Agent and a follow-redirects policy of one, and maxlag backoff when the API signals load.
Every ingested field is traceable to the endpoint and the record it came from.
Attribution travels with the content: an image credit is rendered on the page that displays the image, not only in a central list.

Reader privacy

There are no accounts, no logins, no comment forms, no newsletter, no analytics scripts, and no advertising or tracking tags on this site. Pages are static files; serving them collects nothing beyond what the host's ordinary server logs contain. Images and fonts: the site's own stylesheet is served from this domain, and typefaces are loaded from Google Fonts — if you would rather not make that request, the site falls back to system serif and sans faces without loss of function.

Questions about sourcing

If a claim on this site has no visible source, that is a defect. Write to corrections@myguitarnotes.com with the page and the sentence, and it will be sourced or removed. Licence and copyright queries go to rights@myguitarnotes.com. See also licensing and attribution and the AI and automation policy.