Editorial Standards

Source hierarchy

Use the source best suited to the claim. Primary documents establish what a law, speech, filing, record, or institution said. Official data describes defined populations and methods. Government audits examine administration. Peer-reviewed research can test hypotheses within its design. Nonpartisan, advocacy, critical, and journalistic work can frame questions or interpret evidence when labeled accurately.

A source’s institutional status does not excuse reading its method and limitations. No source type receives a decorative badge that turns it into universal proof.

Primary-source preference

When describing the language or date of a statute, constitutional text, speech, treaty, agency rule, or official program, prefer the primary document or an official archive. Secondary sources remain useful for context and competing interpretations.

Government data and analysis

State the population, period, definitions, known exclusions, revision status, and whether a release is preliminary. A national aggregate may conceal state, local, racial, gender, disability, income, or geographic differences. Government analysis is evidence, not a presumption that a program works.

Peer review, advocacy, and critical evidence

Label peer-review status precisely. Do not describe a working paper, book, testimony, or institutional report as peer-reviewed research. Advocacy publications may contain strong evidence and should be included when useful, with their role visible. Serious critical work belongs in the library and on guarantee pages rather than being dismissed or hidden.

Citation rules

Factual claims should cite stable source IDs that resolve to one metadata record. Citation metadata is never copied by hand into multiple articles. A published claim may not cite a draft or unverified source. Archived links supplement rather than obscure the source’s public origin.

Statistics and causal claims

Give the measure, unit, time, population, and meaningful comparator. Do not use unsupported totals, percentages without denominators, false precision, or claims that a proposal “pays for itself” without a transparent model. Distinguish association, projection, mechanism, and causal estimate. “Evidence suggests” is usually more accurate than “science proves.”

Legal-status labeling

Constitutional rights, state constitutional rights, statutory entitlements, statutory protections, regulatory protections, public-service commitments, international norms, proposed policies, proposed guarantees, and aspirational principles are different categories. Every guarantee carries one or more visible labels linking to How Rights Work.

Review dates and editorial notes

A review date says when the page’s editorial state was last examined; it does not imply outside expert or legal review. When research is incomplete, narrow the claim and show a visible research note. Do not hide placeholders such as “TODO” or “needs source” in published content.

Disagreement, tradeoffs, and objections

State meaningful objections in terms a serious critic could recognize. Include cost, funding, eligibility, capacity, federalism, supply, market response, capture, liberty, fraud, incentives, transition, distribution, trust, measurement, and unintended consequences where relevant. Disagreement does not prove bad character.

Historical corrections

Distinguish rhetoric, enactment, administration, and lived access. Examine who benefited and who was excluded. A historical figure’s support is never offered as sufficient authority for a modern claim.

Conflicts of interest and funding

Relevant financial, professional, organizational, or political relationships should be disclosed when they exist. The project currently has no verified funding or organizational disclosures to publish; the absence of supplied information is not proof that no future conflict could arise.

Corrections and revision history

Factual errors should be corrected promptly after review. Material changes should carry a dated note explaining what changed. Minor copyedits need not clutter the public log unless they alter meaning. See the corrections process.

Fabrication is prohibited

Do not invent sources, URLs, quotations, statistics, legal holdings, article titles, authors, dates, affiliations, staff, partners, donors, testimonials, or results. A shorter honest page is better than polished falsehood.

Use of AI assistance

AI tools may assist with structure, drafting, code, editing, comparison, or research discovery. Generated material must be reviewed, verified, and sourced before it is treated as factual publication content. This working build used AI assistance; that statement does not claim that independent human editorial or expert review has occurred.