Editorial policy

These rules are short on purpose: they are meant to be checked against the pages, not admired.

Numbers come from somewhere

Figures, dates, licence and registration details and quoted sentences are taken from the document they appear in, and from nowhere else. Where the source cannot be named, the field is left out rather than filled with an estimate. A round number with no source attached is a mistake on this site, not a style.

No invented people

Articles appear under the publication’s name. We do not attach personal bylines, degrees, years of experience or “our expert tested this” claims to our copy: each of those is a statement about a person, and we are not in a position to stand behind it. Where a real person is named on a page, they are named because a source names them.

Paid placements are labelled

Some articles on this site are paid placements and carry links bought by third parties. They are published as supplied and are not editorial recommendations. The label sits on the article itself, not only here. A placement buys a link; it does not buy an opinion in our own copy, and it does not get an article edited or taken down elsewhere on the site.

What the date means

The date under a headline is the date of that text: taken from the article where the article states one, and from the publication record otherwise. Section fronts carry the date their contents last changed, because that is what changes there. We do not refresh a date to make an old page look new.

Inherited pages

Pages that came with the domain keep their original address and their original wording. They are re-dressed, re-filed and relinked; they are not re-argued, and nothing is added to them that their authors did not write. Where such a page names an organisation or a speaker, that name stays as written — removing it would leave a fabricated attribution behind.

Corrections and removals

Corrections go to [email protected]. We correct the page itself and say what changed, rather than deleting it quietly: an address that has been linked to is worth keeping alive. Requests to remove archive material are answered by the same address.