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The purpose, the audiences it is designed around, and the distinction between what this project is and what it is not, stated flatly in both directions.
For roughly two centuries, the most widely circulated account of Yorùbá tradition was written by people who had decided in advance what it was.
The Church Missionary Society arrived in Yorùbáland in the 1840s with a theological framework that had no category for a non-Abrahamic religious system except the demonic. Samuel Àjàyí Crowther's 1843 vocabulary and his subsequent Bible translation rendered Satan as Èṣù, a Yorùbá òrìṣà of the crossroads, of communication and of the enforcement of exchange, and not remotely a devil in the tradition's own terms. That single translation choice, made by the most influential Yorùbá churchman of the nineteenth century, put a Yorùbá deity's name in the mouth of every Yorùbá-speaking Christian as the word for evil, and it is still there.
The framing did not stay in the nineteenth century. It ran forward through mid-century mission education, into the Nigerian Pentecostal spiritual-warfare movement from the 1970s onward, and into Nollywood, where the babaláwo is a stock villain and the shrine is a horror set. Millions of Yorùbá people now inherit their first and often only account of their own ancestors' intellectual life from a source that was built to discredit it.
The accurate account exists. It is in Bascom on Ifá divination, Abímbọ́lá on the literary corpus, Verger on the Atlantic transmission, Peel on the missionary encounter itself, Ogundiran on the archaeology, Abiodun on the aesthetics, Barber on oríkì, and several hundred others. It is also almost entirely locked in university libraries, in monographs priced beyond an ordinary reader, in journals behind paywalls, and in prose written for other specialists.
So the material was never the problem. The assembly was. Nobody had put the documented account in one place, in plain English, with the sources attached, at a length that could actually answer a question, free, for a general reader who had reason not to trust what they had already been told.
To assemble the documented record of Yorùbá culture, history and thought into a single free reference work that a non-specialist can read and a specialist can check, citing every claim, marking every gap, and showing every disagreement rather than resolving it quietly.
That any Yorùbá person, anywhere, who wants to know what their heritage actually was can find out in an afternoon, from a source that shows its working and asks nothing of their faith.
In priority order. The design is built around the first of these, and the rest inherit it.
The reader who was taught this was demonic
The primary audience. They arrive defensive, they are not browsing, and they are checking whether it is safe to look. The citations on the surface, the confidence ratings above the fold, and the flat unmystical visual register all exist to signal before a word is read that this is a reference work with an apparatus, not a shrine and not an argument.
The diaspora reader reconnecting
Frequently second generation, frequently without the language, frequently facing a wall of material online that is either devotional, commercial, or invented.
The student and the scholar
People who need a correctly diacriticised, properly cited orientation to an area adjacent to their own, and a route into the primary literature.
The practitioner
Òrìṣà practitioners in Nigeria and the Americas who want an accurate general reference they can hand to someone who has questions, written by someone making no claim to their standing.
A reference corpus
Long-form documents with a glossary of every Yorùbá term used anywhere in them, plus structured records covering Odù, òrìṣà, places, dated events and a concept graph. The current figures are on the organisation's front page.
Sourced throughout
Every substantive claim carries an inline marker pointing to a named source in the file's own Sources block.
Confidence-marked
Every document carries a confidence rating. Contested material is flagged as contested rather than smoothed into a consensus that does not exist.
Free to read
Permanently, for individuals, without an account.
Written in correct Yorùbá orthography
Full diacritics, tone marks and subdots throughout, because ọkọ̀, ọkọ and ọ̀kọ̀ are three different words and writing them all as oko destroys information.
Explicit about what it does not know
Gaps are marked as gaps. The structured records carry an explicit list of attributes the corpus refuses to assert because it could not verify them, which is the single most checkable commitment on this site.
The negative half is the half a defensive reader is actually checking, so it is stated as flatly as the positive one.
Not a devotional resource
It does not ask anyone to believe anything, does not tell anyone what to practise, and does not argue that Yorùbá tradition is true.
Not an attack on anyone's faith
It does not argue that Christianity or Islam is false. Most Yorùbá people today are Christian or Muslim, and the corpus documents how that happened without editorialising about whether it should have.
Not an apologetic, and not romantic
Yorùbá states sold people into the Atlantic trade as well as being devastated by it. Human sacrifice existed in specific documented nineteenth-century forms and was grossly exaggerated by European observers with an interest in exaggerating it. Widely circulated claims about Egyptian origins and the Yorùbá invention of binary computing are not supported by the evidence and are addressed directly. A reference that could not say those things would not be trustworthy on anything else.
Not a divination service
It does not perform readings, interpret a cast, identify anyone's Odù, or simulate any part of Ifá practice. The Odù material documents the structure and the scholarly record. It does not tell a reader what an Odù means for them.
Not initiated, and not speaking as though it were
The people who compiled this are not babaláwo, not priests, not elders, and not custodians of the tradition. Those standings belong to initiated people and to lineages. Nothing here claims them.
Not an authority that supersedes living practitioners
Where a documented account and a living lineage's account differ, this corpus records the documentation and notes that it is documentation. It does not adjudicate.
Not a charitable foundation, despite the name
Ìpilẹ̀ṣẹ̀ means foundation in the structural sense, a base, an originating ground, not in the philanthropic sense.