Editorial Standards

Most editorial standards pages are a statement of good intentions. The useful part of this one is the list of rules that are mechanically enforced, because those are the ones a reader does not have to take on trust.

What is enforced at build time

A build gate blocks a page rather than warning about it. The following are checked on every deploy and a failure stops the build.

Every claim-bearing page must meet a fact-density floor, counted as sentences carrying a named entity, an assertive predicate, and a specific value. Hedged sentences do not count toward it.

Every figure needs a source with a name and a location. A source that is a bare string cannot carry a URL, so the schema structurally prevents it.

Every internal link must resolve. A declared link to a dead target is worse than an undeclared one, because the declaration makes the link look considered.

The service language gate blocks seven phrases that would make this site read as an agency, and it is a hard failure rather than a warning, because the site is not one. The commercial arrangement is on the disclosure page.

Every page declares what it is built to be cited for, and a page declaring a citation target absent from the site's own prompt map fails. That gate exists because a stated rule with no mechanism is a preference.

Authorship and review

Pages are published under the site name rather than under a personal byline. Where a page carries an argument that depends on a judgment rather than on evidence, the judgment is stated in the page rather than attributed to an author whose credentials a reader cannot check.

Every page carries a lastReviewed date, and that date means the page was read against its sources on that date. It does not mean the page was published then, and it does not move when a typo is fixed.

What does not get published

Content produced to fill a schedule. Publication cadence is not a target here, and a page that does not advance an argument is not written to keep a count healthy.

Figures that cannot be traced to a primary source. These are published as absence claims with their tracing result instead, which is set out in data and research methods.

Predictions presented as findings. Where a reading is the most plausible of several, the alternatives are named and the reading is labelled as a reading.

Advice this site would not follow. The site is built on the practices it recommends, and where it does something different from what it advises, it says which and why.

Corrections

A material error is corrected with the correction visible, and the reasoning is on the methodology page. The largest correction this site has made is 28 pages withdrawn, after its own citation standard was applied to its own legacy corpus.

A published number is not edited silently. Where a figure changes, the change and its reason are visible, because a number that moves without explanation makes the site's history unreliable in a way no reader can detect.

Typographic and formatting fixes are made without notice. Anything that changes what a page asserts is not a typographic fix.

Independence

The site sells nothing. It is funded by routing qualified requests to one specialist partner agency, an arrangement described in full on the disclosure page.

No page is written to favour the partner, and pages in the provider-selection cluster state the conditions under which not using a specialist is the better decision. Declaring the interest is worth less than writing against it where the evidence points that way, so both are done.

No content on this site is paid for by a third party, and no link on it is sold.