How BOMwiki data works
BOMwiki maps what physical products are made of as a recursive graph: a product contains assemblies, assemblies contain components, components map to standard parts. This page is the honest account of where that data comes from today and how it earns trust over time.
Where the BOMs come from today
Every bill of materials on BOMwiki right now is AI-inferred from engineering knowledge — a first-pass model of how a representative product of its kind is typically built. It is not scraped from manufacturers, and it is not yet verified against a specific real-world brand, model, or revision. Treat current pages as a structural map of an archetype, not a sourced record of an exact product.
What AI does — and doesn't do
AI is used to draft, not to declare truth. Our rule: AI creates candidate claims; evidence promotes claims.
- AI does: generate first-pass BOMs, decompose assemblies, normalise part names, match shared components across products, suggest likely equivalents and failure links.
- AI must not: present unsourced guesses as verified fact, invent real prices, stock, supplier SKUs, model years, or availability, or collapse genuinely different model/year variants into one generic BOM.
Specificity — what kind of "truth" a page is
Pages are labelled by how specific the claim is, so you always know what you're looking at:
- L1 — Product class: "Electric Car".
- L2 — Archetype: "400 V skateboard-platform EV" (most pages today).
- L3 — Brand / model: "Tesla Model 3".
- L4 — Model / year / variant: "2022 Tesla Model 3 Long Range".
- L5–L6 — Serial / batch / teardown-verified unit.
Confidence labels on a claim
Each BOM row is treated as a claim, not a fact, and carries a status:
- AI-inferred — generated, no independent source yet (everything today).
- Likely — consistent with general engineering practice.
- Source-backed — supported by at least one external source.
- Reviewed — checked by a human.
- Verified — multiple sources and/or teardown evidence.
- Disputed / Deprecated — contested or superseded.
Sourcing and prices
Vendor and price information shown on parts is indicative and estimated — real companies mapped by component category, with prices, MOQ, and lead times that are modelled, not live quotes. We do not present synthetic prices, stock, or SKUs as real supplier inventory. Verified, source-backed supplier offers will be clearly labelled when they exist.
How this gets better
The plan is to keep the internal graph broad but publish and index only what's useful and
credible. Claims move from AI-inferred toward source-backed and
verified as we add evidence — service manuals, teardowns, datasheets, regulatory
filings — starting with one excellent real-world vertical. Pages that don't yet pass quality
and evidence gates stay browsable but are marked noindex for search engines.
Corrections
Spotted something wrong? Public contribution and dispute handling are on the roadmap. Until then, corrections are reviewed privately. The goal is a Wikipedia-style editing model with evidence requirements and structured moderation.