A colophon says how a thing was made.
At the back of a printed book sits a short note: who set the type, on what press, on what paper. It makes no claim about whether the book is any good. It simply says how the thing in your hands came to exist.
Why this exists
There is a genre of site that presents itself as oversight of artificial intelligence. It has a dark interface, a live-looking board, and a great many numbers. Read the small print and the numbers are marked illustrative — which is to say invented, arranged to look like a measurement.
That is worse than saying nothing. It borrows the authority of a register while carrying none of the obligations of one, and it teaches readers that governance dashboards are a genre of decoration.
CALAPHON is the same shape built the other way round. The rubric was written and published before a single model was scored. Every figure comes from a public API that needs no account. Where the sample is thin, the page prints withheld instead of a number.
What it refuses to do
It will not review models. Nothing here says a model is good, safe, capable or advisable. It says whether the repository explains itself. Those are different questions, and conflating them is how a documentation score quietly becomes a quality ranking nobody validated.
It will not take corrections by request. A publisher who wants a better entry can add the heading and wait for the register to come round again. A register that can be edited by the parties it assesses is a directory.
It will not quote a proportion off a thin sample. Below the floor the pages refuse outright rather than printing a percentage with a caveat underneath — caveats are read after the number has already done its work.
It will not hide a change of instrument. Altering any weight changes the rubric version and clears the register. Scores from a different scale are not comparable, and mixing them silently would be the precise failure this project was built to point at.
The name
A colophon is the printer's statement at the end of a book. A model card is the same object for a different kind of artefact — and the question worth asking about the models the world now runs on is whether that statement was ever written. The spelling is our own, so that a search for it finds this and nothing else.