Molecupedia:About

Molecupedia is an encyclopedia of very small things, written and published by Molecular Reality Corporation, a company that builds instruments for detecting single molecules and particles as they pass through holes. It looks like an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It is a company's encyclopedia that no one can edit. Everything stated in it as fact is meant to be true, and almost all of it is about the company, its science, its field and the history behind them.

Molecupedia has four kinds of article. Some are about the company itself, from its history and instruments to its games and characters. Some are about the science it works on, from the Coulter counter to the nanopore and the noise in a transimpedance amplifier. Some are about the other companies and laboratories in the field, including the company's competitors. The rest are about the history of science, because the company's first name and several of its ideas come from it.

The site borrows the layout and typography of Wikipedia. It is not Wikipedia, it has no connection with the Wikimedia Foundation, and its name and logo are its own. The company that is the subject of most of its articles is also their author and their publisher. That is a conflict of interest, and the article on the company carries a banner that says so; see Molecupedia:Conflict of interest.

Molecular Reality Corporation writes every page. There are no outside contributors and there is no edit button: each page has a "View source" tab where Wikipedia has "Edit".

Talk pages and page histories show editors with names such as PicoampPedant, Ionophore and DwellTimeDave. The usernames and personalities are invented. The facts they argue about are real, and each one is sourced like a fact in an article.

Many articles cite seven publications: The Picoampere, The Femtoliter Review, Brownian Business Daily, Signal & Noise, The Coulter Courier, Debye Length and Ludicious. They publish only on this website, the company writes them, and their reporters' names are invented. What they report is held to the same rule as the encyclopedia.

The company's guide for visitors, narrated by its mascot Keltar, states its rule: "Real science today. Dreams flagged as dreams. Story flagged as story." Molecupedia follows the same rule. Facts about the company come from its public web pages, its open repository, its videos and posted messages, its patent, the registration records of its domains and its internal records; where a fact comes only from the last of these, the article cites "Company records". Facts about science come from published papers, cited with their digital object identifiers. Where the company's materials and the published science disagree, an article gives both and cites the science.

Plans are described as plans, so the company's open reader is always a design that has not yet been built and measured. Characters are described as characters. Where an article reports something that happens only in the company's fiction, such as Keltar's arrival from another dimension in 2012, it says so. Facts that could not be checked were left out.

The jokes are in the choice and arrangement of true facts. If a reader finds a false sentence, the company would like to hear about it.

The Main Page changes its "On this day" section with the date. Portal:Molecular Reality and Portal:Nanopores list articles by subject, and Special:Random opens an article at random. Every page has a search box, a night mode and a layout for phones, and "Cite this page" in the tools menu gives a ready-made citation.

The company can be reached at the addresses shown on its previous front page:

• Signal: +1-650-499-9573
• Email: kent@molecularReality.com, written with a capital R

The company's guide gives the same number as the call-in line for its live stream. Corrections to articles are welcome by email.

• Layout and typography are adapted from Vector 2022, a skin of MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia. The skin is available under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later, and every page credits it in its footer. Some template styles follow Wikipedia's, which are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license.
• The logo is a molecule of buckminsterfullerene, drawn by the company from the coordinates of its 60 carbon atoms, with one hexagon in the company's green carrying the letters MR.
• Photographs, renders and artwork are the company's own unless their file pages say otherwise. Images made with generative software are captioned as such, and renders of the MR1 Nanopore Reader are captioned as renders of an unbuilt design.

• Molecupedia
• Molecupedia:General disclaimer
• Molecupedia:Neutral point of view