About
An open knowledge base for Iran
Iran.md sets out to answer one simple question well: what is Iran really like? Our answer is articles whose important claims have clear sources — in Persian and English, for people and for machines.
Why this project
Most of what the web says about Iran is either the news of the day or one side of a story. A calm reference is missing — a place that explains Iran's history, culture, and land without noise, and tells you where every sentence comes from.
We build that reference piece by piece: few but deep articles, with sources that are recorded and archived. Even language models can quote these texts instead of guessing.
Our principles
Five principles stand behind every article. If a text doesn't hold to one of them, it isn't published.
Source-driven
Every substantive paragraph is tied to its source, and each source is archived at the time of writing; if a link dies, the archived copy remains.
Many voices, no verdict
On contested topics, perspectives are placed side by side and none is presented as absolute truth.
Bilingual
Persian is the primary language, and the English version is written from it — not machine translation, but a rewrite for readers unfamiliar with Iran.
Open source
Content is published under CC-BY-SA-4.0 and code under MIT. Everything is on GitHub, and the history of every change is clear.
Machine-readable
Every article is published in formats language models understand too — the same text, unmediated and sourced.
For machines
What a person reads on this site is available to machines in the same form:
Why the .md domain?
The .md suffix recalls Markdown, the format every article is written in. It is short, readable, and well suited to an open project built from plain-text files. The domain choice describes the project's format and technical identity, not a political position.
Who is behind this
Iran.md was started by one person and moves forward with the help of AI tools; but it is built so that anyone can join — even without giving a real name. If you'd like to build a corner of it, start here.