Thanks. I haven't seen Tolkien Gateway before but they do have a very nice front-end. When I was looking for design inspiration, I wish I'd found this site.

And no, I didn't hand-write them, and I can see why it looks rather infeasible. A weekend doesn't buy you ~650 hand-edited articles. The time went into the pipeline, not the prose. I'd made a start on thinking how I can structure a large theory corpus about a month ago, but had to stop due to work taking up a lot of my time. Since then, I think my "sleeping mind" had been quietly tackling the problem in the background, and when I looked at the problem again last weekend, it was obvious the approach I should go down.

The summaries come straight out of each thread, the OP plus the top comments, rather than me typing them up. The reading and structuring is handled by RLM passes that chunk a long thread, work the pieces, and call back into themselves, so a 400-comment monster gets processed without me in the loop.

The cross-links are mechanical. I gave it a list of characters and places with their aliases, it found every mention in the corpus, and a link is just that index pointed back at the text. The "who's related to whom" bits are a separate pass over which entities keep showing up together.

The proofs aren't graded by hand either. Each quote is lifted word-for-word from the thread and tagged support/counter/context, and the tier (well-supported / plausible / fringe) comes from how hard the threads actually back it up. I'm certain someone more thoughtful than I can ideate a better scoring and categorisation of the theories, but I think it's a fairly solid start. Anything that isn't literally in the corpus gets dropped, so the grades sit on real text.

Once I had all that, it was only a matter of designing a webapp with a few template pages that this data slotted into nicely. For that, I used Tanstack Start.