Editorial policy

Most editorial policies are aspirational documents nobody checks. This one describes rules that are executed on every build, and a violation of any of them stops the site being written at all.

How AI is used

Plainly: AI is used for drafting, outlining, restructuring and metadata on this site, and the aiAssisted field on each page records whether it was used there.

It is not used to supply facts, figures, or judgments. Every figure comes from the statistics ledger, where each entry was fetched from its primary source on a recorded date. Every documented claim links to the documentation.

The byline names a person, never a model, because the byline identifies who is accountable for the page being correct.

That field is a factual statement about production, and it is deliberately not a lever. The YMYL gate cannot be satisfied by changing aiAssisted to false — a rule you can edit your way around is not a rule.

The review cycle

Every page gets a next-check date ninety days out. When one goes by, the build stops. That turns "we should keep this current" from a good intention into something that blocks the work.

A review is not a glance. It covers: re-verifying each cited figure against its primary source, checking that linked documentation still says what the page claims, re-checking platform-behavior rows that decay fastest, confirming internal links resolve, and reconsidering whether any claim should move between evidence grades.

That last one matters most. A claim graded Speculative today may become Documented when a platform publishes something — and a claim graded Documented can become wrong when a platform changes its rules.

Corrections

Errors get corrected on the page, and the modification date moves. Where a correction changes a conclusion rather than a detail, the page says what it previously said and why it was wrong.

This site argues that search content decays silently and that undated pages are unreliable. Quietly editing an error out would be the same failure.

What stops publication

The complete list, enforced in code rather than in process:

1. Any required field missing.
2. A review date that has lapsed.
3. An author or reviewer who is not in the entity file, or who has no stated credential.
4. An invalid evidence grade, or a grade with no stated reason.
5. A figure in prose that is not traceable to the statistics ledger.
6. An incomplete ledger entry.
7. A dead internal link.
8. A glossary term that does not exist.
9. A broken heading hierarchy, or more than one top-level heading.
10. A pillar with no spokes, or a spoke that does not link to its pillar.
11. An AI-assisted YMYL page with no distinct subject-matter reviewer.
12. A page claiming its evidence is documented without citing documentation.