Editorial standards

1. What these standards cover

This page states the values that the published method serves. The method page describes the mechanics — sourcing tiers, drafting sequence, verification, review cycle. This page describes what those mechanics are for, and it is the document against which a reader is invited to judge any page on the site.

The standards apply to everything published here, including material that is clearly descriptive rather than evaluative. A description of common practice can mislead just as easily as an assertion, and it is held to the same requirement: traceable, dated, proportionate to the evidence, and honest about what is not known.

2. Accuracy before speed

Nothing on this site is time-critical, so there is no legitimate reason to publish before a page is right. There is no publication schedule, no traffic target and no growth objective attached to any page. Where a subject is moving too quickly to describe accurately, the page is not written until the subject settles, and where a claim cannot be located in a source, it is removed rather than hedged.

This is a genuine constraint rather than an aspiration. It is the reason the site has thirty pages rather than three hundred, and it is why several obvious subjects in this field are absent: they could not be described to the standard without speculation.

3. Proportion and the weight of a claim

A page should give a claim the space its evidence earns. Symmetry is not balance: presenting a well-evidenced finding and a contested assertion in equal terms misrepresents the record, and doing so to appear even-handed is a failure of accuracy rather than a display of fairness.

Where evidence is genuinely unsettled — the effect of ranked distribution on what people believe, for instance — the page says so and describes the state of the debate. Where a strong version of a claim is popular but weakly supported, the page distinguishes the strong version from the narrower one that the evidence actually sustains. This distinction appears repeatedly across the site and is deliberate.

4. Independence in practice

No sponsorship, no advertising, no affiliate arrangement, no paid placement, no payment for coverage or links, and no commercial relationship with any tool provider, platform, publisher or institution mentioned in the text. No external party sees a page before publication, and no institution has any editorial role.

Independence also means declining to be useful to a vendor by accident. This site does not name or rank commercial tools, does not reproduce vendor benchmarks and does not publish material that would function as a product comparison. Classes of tool are described by the artefact they produce, which is more durable and cannot be quoted in anyone’s marketing.

5. People, sources and privacy

This site publishes no named individuals: no staff names, no author bylines, no photographs, no case studies built around a person, and no invented practitioners presented as examples. Work is described by role, and accountability rests with the operator company. That choice suits a small reference operation and removes an entire category of risk.

It follows that this desk holds no confidential sources and offers no secure submission channel, and readers are asked not to send confidential material. Where pages discuss source protection, they do so as a description of practice elsewhere, with the clear statement that the legal position differs by jurisdiction and requires professional advice.

6. Language and tone

Prose is written for an informed general reader. Terms that cannot be avoided are defined in the lexicon and used consistently. Hype adjectives, superlatives, rankings and claims of being best or first are not used, because they are not checkable and because they are the register of marketing rather than reference.

Three words are deliberately avoided: “hallucination” as a technical term, because it implies perception where there is none; “algorithm” as a standalone noun, because it collapses three distinct ranking stages into one opaque object; and “engagement” without a stated definition attached. Headings are informative rather than teasing, which serves scanning readers and screen-reader users equally.

7. The correction workflow

Corrections are handled the same way every time, whether the error was reported by a reader or found internally, and whether it is trivial or serious. The sequence below is the whole process.

1. Receipt The request is logged with the page, the sentence in question and the date. Receipt is acknowledged where practical.
2. Assessment The claim is located in its original source. If the source has moved or been superseded, the replacement is found before anything is changed.
3. Decision The request is accepted, partly accepted or declined, and the reasoning is recorded. A declined request still receives a reply.
4. Amendment The page is corrected in place. The superseded wording is retained in the note where anyone might have quoted it.
5. Note A visible correction note records what was wrong, what it now says and when the change was made.
6. Sweep Other pages are checked for the same error, since a mistaken understanding usually appears more than once.
7. Reply The person who reported it is told the outcome, whether or not the request was accepted.

8. What is never done

Pages are not silently amended: any substantive change carries a note. Pages are not deleted to resolve a complaint, because deletion removes the record without removing the error. Corrections are not hidden at the foot of a page where nobody reads them, and a correction is never presented as a clarification when it was a mistake.

• No silent edits to substantive claims.
• No deletion of a page in response to a complaint.
• No monetary figures in any example.
• No named individuals as authors, sources or case studies.
• No claim of accreditation, recognition, endorsement or supervision.
• No product recommendations, rankings or vendor benchmarks.
• No predictions presented as analysis.
• No generated prose published substantially as generated.
• No external requests, tags, pixels or widgets of any kind.

9. Complaints beyond corrections

If a reader believes a page breaches these standards in a way that a correction would not resolve — a question of proportion, framing or independence — that can be raised through the contact page with the subject line “Correction”. It will be assessed against this document and answered in writing, and where the complaint is upheld the change and the reason will be stated on the page.

This desk is not a member of any press complaints body and does not hold itself out as being subject to one. In Ireland, complaints against member publications are handled by the Office of the Press Ombudsman under the Code of Practice for Newspapers and Magazines, and broadcasting and online safety matters fall to Coimisiún na Meán. Those bodies are named here as public reference points only.

Questions about standards