What X-Labs is, and what it is not

Who writes this

Aldin Smajkan. One person, working alone.

There is no research team. No university. No institutional backing. Nothing here has been peer reviewed. If any of that changes, this paragraph changes with it, and not before.

What gets published here

Four kinds of thing. Every page says which one it is.

• A methodology describes how a piece of work was actually done.
• A proposal describes something that has not been built.
• A note is a short observation.
• An update says what has happened on a project that already exists here.

There is no "paper" and no "finding" on purpose. A type name is a claim like any other, and neither of those would be true.

What you can use here, as opposed to read

Three of the pages do something rather than say something. All three are open, need no account, and are marked for what they are. They are one tool at three depths, not three tools.

• Ask in your own words - the front door. Describe a situation in ordinary language. It answers with citations: which acts it reaches, which word of your sentence reached each one, and which gazette issue carried the readable text at a year you name. It does not know what a provision says.
• The register - the same holdings, browsed rather than asked. Every act, every gazette issue that changed it, and the chain computed for any year. Citations and links to the publisher's own documents, never legal text.
• The reading bench - the instrument underneath. Paste a provision, say what you read it to fix, and the engine prints what follows from your reading. It holds no law and stores nothing.

Bosnia and Herzegovina legislates in four places, and this register holds one of them in full. The other three are named on every page, each with the reason it cannot be reached for free. An empty answer and "we cannot read that publisher" are different sentences, and only one of them is true.

None of the three is legal advice, and none of them is a product.

What happens to an article after it is published

Every article has a version number and a publication date.

When one is revised, it gets a dated line saying what changed. It keeps its address and its identity. A correction is not a new article at a new URL, and it is not a quiet edit to the old one.

A withdrawn article also keeps its address. It says that it was withdrawn and why. Nothing here is deleted, because a link that stops working leaves every citation of it lying.

The rest of the rules are in How research here is done: primary sources, retrieval dates, and what happens when a source cannot be fetched.

The reading order

Everything published here is one line of work, and it reads in this order. Each article says at the top which question it answers, so nobody has to read all of them to use the tool.

1. Ask in your own words - try the thing first. Five seconds.
2. This page - what X-Labs is, who writes it, and what is never claimed.
3. Temporal legal state in BiH - the project: what is being built, for whom, and what would stop it.
4. What a rule said on a date - the survey of official sources, including the four findings that argue against the ambitious version of the idea.
5. May this material be republished? - whether the texts may be copied at all, and what that decides about how a corpus has to be built.
6. The legal engine, first working version - the engine that refuses to turn "we do not hold that" into "no".
7. Twenty questions you expect it to get wrong - the open call, and the scoring rules written before anything was sent.
8. How research here is done - the working rules every page above is held to.

Corrections

This article was changed after publication. It keeps its address and its identity; what follows is what changed and when.

• 16 September 2026Rewritten around what a reader can do here: an orientation line at the top, the question box at /labs/ask named as the front door alongside the register and the bench, the fact that the country legislates in four places and only one is held, and an explicit reading order for everything published here. No claim, source, date or commitment was changed.
• 15 September 2026Added a section naming the two pages here that do something rather than say something - the reading bench and the demo register - because a reader had no way to find out from this page that they exist.
• 15 September 2026Replaced a section describing how this site is published with what a reader needs to know instead: what happens to an article after publication. The publishing mechanism is an internal workflow detail and belongs in the editorial guide, not on a public page.
• 15 September 2026Rewritten in plainer English. Shorter sentences, fewer clauses, the point first. No claim, source, date or commitment was changed, added or removed.