qotm

qotm brings a moment of reflection to the command line: each new terminal shows a sourced quote from a programmer, scientist or mathematician, even offline.

Behind the CLI is a community platform at qotm.dev. Anyone can read and search the collection. Members submit quotes, verifiers check each one against its source, and curators decide which quotes ship to every install.

The harder problem was trust. Quote collections are full of misattributions: words that sound like Einstein or Knuth and were never theirs. A quote tool is only worth using if its quotes are real. So qotm needed more than a list of strings. It needed provenance for every quote, a way for people to contribute, and a review process that keeps the collection reliable as it grows.

Curated quotes reach the CLI as versioned, immutable dataset releases. An admin builds a preview, reviews it and publishes it, and every install picks it up on its next sync.

The web platform at qotm.dev makes the collection browsable through Discover, Latest, Curated, topic and author pages, with search, member profiles and shareable quote cards rendered as images. Every public page is served with full metadata, so search engines and link previews can read it.

Behind it is a review console where each decision is made by a person and recorded in an audit log. Verifiers check whether someone really said a quote and whether there is evidence. Curators use a seven-point checklist to decide what ships to the CLI, and moderators handle reports and disputes. Popularity is shown to curators but never decides what ships.

The launch collection holds 3,629 quotes built from Wikiquote and Wikidata, each with its source and filed under 25 topics. The best-sourced quotes were verified on import, and about 500 were curated into the first release.