Engagements source guide: what to record

Of everything a celebrity relationship timeline tries to hold, an engagement is the one with nothing behind it. A marriage leaves a record that a county clerk or a state vital records office can produce on request; an engagement leaves nothing of the sort. No registry keeps them, no authority is notified, no document is created, and nothing obliges anyone to say a word.

So the entire evidence base is statements, and the practical work is the work of citing statements well: things said aloud, things posted and later deleted, things confirmed at second hand. This engagements source guide is about that work, and about the parties whose interest in the answer is commercial.

What to take away

Citing something that was spoken

A remark in an interview, on a broadcast, on a stage, or in a recorded conversation is perfectly good evidence and it is awkward to cite, which is why most citations of it are bad.

Spelled out, the five parts are:

The last one is not optional. Paraphrase turns a careful statement into a stronger claim than the speaker made. Once the paraphrase is in your record, the original is gone.

Where the material is in a recording, note the position in it. A reader trying to check a remark inside a long recording without a timestamp will give up, and a citation nobody can check is doing the job of decoration.

Three dates sit behind any published statement: the day it was said, the day it was published, and the day it entered the record. The gap between the first two can be substantial in interview material, and it decides which date the entry carries. For cases where these dates do not line up, see the announcement-timing guide.

Material that can be deleted

Anything published in a place its author controls can be edited without a trace or removed entirely, and in this subject that is where a large share of first-party statements live. Preserving a copy is deliberate work: the routine business of services such as the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, archive.today and Perma.cc, and questions raised in discussions of community archiving.

Record it as though it will disappear, because a good proportion of it does.

The four fields are the exact wording, copied as written; the handle that published it and whose account that is; the date and time the post carried; and where it appeared, platform and address. A row holding those four things, with your preserved copy alongside them, is not damaged when the original goes. A row holding a link is finished. For handling citations whose links no longer resolve, see the guide to dead links and older entries.

Dating things that carry no date

Much of this material arrives undated: a photograph, a clip, a repost, an image of text. The temptation is to treat the date you encountered it as the date it exists.

Three honest positions, in order of preference. First, set the date from the item or its publisher, and cite that.

Second, set a bound, such as no later than its first publication in an identifiable place, and record the bound, not a point. Third, record the date as unknown. That is a real answer, better than a wrong one.

Never date an item to when you found it. That produces entries in the wrong period and every interval computed from them inherits the error, as explained in the relationship-date guide.

Who has an interest in the answer

In celebrity coverage an engagement generates commercial activity, and several kinds of party benefit from it being publicly known: a publicist working the announcement, an outlet that has been granted the interview, a brand with a launch to time. That does not make what they say false. It does mean their confirmation is not disinterested, and a chronology entry should show which kind of party it came from.

For this chronology, the fourth and fifth rows matter because commercial parties may have interests that make their claims hard to assess independently. Treat that as an editorial evidence judgment, not a legal finding. The privacy discussion explains what this chronology leaves out.

The confirmation chain

"Confirmed" is the most overloaded word in this material. Read backwards through it every time.

A confirmation by the people involved is a first-party statement, while one by a representative is on their behalf, nearly as good but not the same.

A confirmation reported by an outlet means that outlet tells you a confirmation was given to them, and you rely on them for it. A confirmation attributed to nobody is not a confirmation.

The distinction has a familiar shape. The engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle reached the public first in a statement issued on their behalf, and the detail came afterwards in a broadcast interview. Those are two separate entries, one from a representative and one from the couple themselves.

Write which of the four you have into the entry, because the reader cannot see it and the word alone will not tell them. The distinctions between speakers and capacities are explained in the guide to engagement announcements.

Common questions

Nothing has been said by anybody. Can the entry exist on reporting alone?

Only as a record of what an outlet published, named and dated, with what remains unestablished stated plainly. It cannot be recorded as a status, because nothing has established one.

Is a translated quotation usable?

Yes, with the original wording kept alongside it. Hedges and qualifiers are exactly what translation loses, and in this subject the hedge is often the whole meaning.

How should a citation handle two versions of the same statement?

Keep both versions, date each one using its own publication information, and note that an edit occurred. Preserve available copies using the fields above; broader advice appears in the source-tracing guide.

Does a wedding later occurring confirm the engagement date?

No. It confirms a wedding. An engagement date is only ever established by someone saying so, and a later event does not reach backwards to supply one.