Sources & Methodology

How an article gets from a topic to a published page.

Sources we rely on

• Primary records: published papers, institutional archives, award citations.
• Academic and institutional references: university archives, research institutes, scholarly encyclopedias.
• General encyclopedias such as Wikipedia are used only to locate or corroborate details, and are labelled as tertiary sources when cited.

Requirements for every article

• At least two sources, each with a working link and the date it was last consulted.
• A recorded fact check stating when and how the claims were compared with the sources.
• A unique title and description, and a category.

These requirements are enforced by the publishing system: an article that lacks them cannot be built.

Fact checking

Each dated or factual claim is compared against the listed sources. Claims found in only one place are either attributed to that source in the text or removed. Where sources give different figures, the article reports both.

Duplicate screening

Before publication, a draft is compared with existing articles so the archive does not accumulate near-identical pages on the same subject.

Review states

An article is first a draft. Once every claim has been checked against its sources it waits for review. An article is published either after the editor approves it or, for articles on a short list chosen after an audit of their evidence, automatically: an automated release requires that every claim is matched to a stored passage from a source read directly and that the article duplicates no other. Automatically released articles say so and have not been reviewed by a human editor.

Limits

Sources can be wrong and links can change. If you find an error, the Editorial Policy explains how corrections are handled.