Version history

Fixed

• Every entry carries its formal term and its spellings, and none of them resolved: searching for arachnophobia, chionophobia or koumpounophobia produced a page that did not exist, while the everyday name worked. The site's own search had always found them, so the failure was invisible from inside. All 634 now redirect to the entry they belong to.
• Building that map found eighteen faults nothing else would have caught. Twelve Greek terms were claimed by two entries at once, including aerophobia, which meant dread of a draught for two centuries before it meant flight, and gynophobia, which two entries held. Each went to the entry named after it, and the losing entry keeps the word in its list of names, so nothing dropped out of search.

Added

• Five collections, written from the arguments the entries were already making. Words Nobody Has Ever Used holds the terms with no case and no prevalence, including the one a cartoonist invented as a joke and the one that is its own suffix spelled backwards. Fears Studied by Everybody Except Psychiatry holds the fears whose research belongs to swimming instructors, paediatricians and vets. When the Suffix Is an Accusation holds the prejudice words. One Word, Two Different Fears holds the collisions. Fears That Are Right About Their Object holds the awkward cases for the rule that a phobia is out of proportion to its danger.
• Entry bodies can carry a table now, and the hubs can carry links. A category intro and a collection thesis were the only prose on the site with nothing linked inside them, which made the pages that rank for the broad queries the least connected in the catalogue.

Changed

• The about page was rewritten. It had been claiming that every source is listed at the foot of an entry, which the entry pages do not do, and that entry bodies carry no links, which stopped being true when the entries started linking each other. It now describes how an entry is actually made, what a label does not mean, and what the site collects, which is nothing: no analytics, no cookies, no account, no server log.

Content

• New entries: fear of falling, fear of drowning, fear of strangers, fear of nature, fear of success, fear of men, fear of cars, fear of being robbed, fear of responsibility, fear of nothingness, fear of being photographed and fear of government. Each was written from sources fetched for it rather than from the entries that referred to it, and each states how thin its record is: three of the twelve rest on a dictionary line and a printed gloss, and say so.
• The thirteenth name, fear of foreigners, was not written. It is xenophobia under another label, and the single reference to it now points there instead of at a page that would have duplicated one.
• Every cross-reference in the catalogue now resolves to a page that exists.

Content

• Sixty-three answers across thirty-two entries were rewritten to carry the source, the figure or the date that the short version had dropped. Three more entries had every answer the same length, which reads as a form rather than as a set of questions somebody asked, and those were varied.
• The tool that applies these rewrites matches an answer by its exact question and refuses anything still under the floor, so an answer cannot be silently attached to the wrong question.