How this edition is made

Twelve folio volumes, printed in Città del Vaticano between 1948 and 1954: some twenty thousand signed entries. This page says how those volumes became the edition you are reading, and where it still falls short of the paper.

The pages

Every page of the twelve volumes, 14,308 in all, was photographed; the scans are kept with the edition, and each entry opens its own printed pages. The text was read from the images by optical character recognition (early 2025) and then checked against the pages it came from: in every volume between 99.9 and 100 per cent of the printed text is found in the entries.

The entries

Where one entry ends and the next begins was worked out from the page itself and checked against the analytical index the Encyclopedia published in 1954: about 97 per cent of the entries found match a line of that index. Several thousand boundaries were checked by hand.

The authors

Signatures were read at the foot of each entry and of each signed section, and matched to the lists of contributors printed in every volume. About 99 per cent of the entries carry a signature; the larger ones often have several authors, section by section.

The columns

The Encyclopedia is cited by column. The column numbers of each entry's first and last line were read from the scans, and every entry gives them in its citation.

The English

The English is a machine translation of the Italian, followed by automated checks: passages left in Italian, missing paragraphs, headings and names. It has not yet been authoritatively reviewed; the Italian is authoritative. Pages that have been reviewed will say so.

The links

Links between entries, and to the sources (Scripture, the Fathers, the councils, the documents of the popes), are proposed by rule and checked one by one by a calibrated classifier: a link stays only when it clears a measured threshold.

Corrections

If you find an error (a misread word, an entry cut short, a wrong link), write to saints@azioneromana.com with the address of the page. Corrections go into the following week's edition and are recorded on the Updates page. For rights holders: the Rights page. What we know of and have not yet solved is set out in Unsolved problems.

What we do not do

We do not change the Encyclopedia's substance or its judgements. Where an entry of the 1950s reflects the knowledge or the assumptions of its time, the text stays as it was printed.