Catechismus & Summa Emendatio Guide

The Catechismus (Baltimore Catechism) and Summa (Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas) are fixed, authoritative texts. They accept corrections only — you cannot submit new content for these genera.

What Qualifies as a Correction

These texts were digitised from historical sources. Corrections fix errors introduced during transcription, not errors in the original text.

Valid correction	Not a correction
Fixing an OCR typo (“tbe” → “the”)	Rewriting a passage for clarity
Restoring a missing paragraph	Adding modern commentary
Correcting garbled Latin	Translating from Latin to English
Fixing broken formatting (collapsed lists, lost line breaks)	Restructuring the argument

Caution

These are archival texts. The goal is faithful restoration, not editorial improvement. Submit exactly what the original says — no modernisation, no paraphrase, no annotation.

Finding the Target Record

Before submitting, you must locate the specific record (question, article) you are correcting.

1. Select Correction mode and choose the type (Catechism or Summa).
2. Use the search field to find the record by text content.
3. The search returns matching records — select the correct one.

The target is set automatically when you select a record from the search results.

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Catechism Corrections

Each Catechism record is a question-and-answer pair from the Baltimore Catechism.

Fields

Field	Description
question	The question text (e.g. “Who made us?”)
answer	The answer text (e.g. “God made us.”)

Submit only the field you are correcting. If the question is correct but the answer has a typo, submit only answer.

Formatting

• Plain text. No Markdown formatting, no bullet points.
• Preserve the exact phrasing and punctuation of the original catechism text.
• Questions end with a question mark. Answers end with a period.
• Do not add question numbers — the archive tracks those separately.

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Summa Corrections

Each Summa record is an article from the Summa Theologiae, structured in the scholastic method.

Fields

Field	Description
sed_contra	The Sed Contra (“On the contrary…”) section
respondeo	The Respondeo (“I answer that…”) section

Submit only the field you are correcting. If the Sed Contra is correct but the Respondeo has errors, submit only respondeo.

Formatting

• Standard Markdown — paragraphs and emphasis are acceptable.
• Preserve St. Thomas’s precise scholastic language. Do not simplify or modernise.
• Retain all internal citations exactly as they appear in the source (e.g. “as the Philosopher says in Physics III”).
• Do not add or remove paragraph breaks from the original structure.

Tip

The Summa was originally written in Latin. If you find a Latin passage rendered incorrectly in the English translation, note this in your submission and correct the English text to match the Latin source.

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Review Process

Corrections to these authoritative texts receive careful scrutiny. Reviewers will:

1. Compare your submission against the original source text.
2. Verify that the correction is faithful to the original — not an editorial change.
3. Approve or reject with notes.

If your correction is rejected, check the reviewer’s notes on your dashboard. The most common reason is scope — the correction altered meaning rather than restoring it.