Editorial and verification policy

Five levels of verification

Every factual record shows one of five labels.

• Officially verified: confirmed directly from an official government or institutional source
• Verified by our team: checked by an editor against a reliable published source
• Awaiting verification: submitted by a business or community member and not yet confirmed
• May be outdated: not re-checked recently
• Sample content: demonstration material that has not been verified

A record can be labelled as verified only when it names the source it was checked against. The source and the date of the last check are shown on the page.

What we will not publish

• Invented contact details, opening hours, fares, ticket prices or coordinates
• Live alerts, weather, traffic or tracking that does not come from a reliable source
• Fabricated reviews or ratings
• Personal appeals for money, or private information about individuals

When a detail cannot be confirmed it is left blank and shown as “not verified” or “unknown”.

The review workflow

Content moves through draft, submitted, under review and published, and can be sent back for correction or archived. Each record keeps its author, its reviewer and its publication date. Contributors can prepare drafts but cannot publish them.

Community submissions always enter a review queue. Accepting a submission creates, at most, an unpublished draft for an editor to verify.

Public safety content

Emergency numbers and shelter information are published only when verified against a named source, and each carries a date by which it must be re-checked. After that date the entry is flagged and marked as possibly outdated.

Live alerts are kept separate from educational guidance. An alert is shown only with its issuing authority, a link to the source, the time it was issued and the time it expires, and it disappears automatically when it expires.

Independence and paid content

Editorial selections are never paid for. Any listing or article that has been paid for is labelled “Sponsored”, and payment does not affect verification.

Corrections

Anyone can suggest an edit from any place, service or article page. Corrections are checked against a source before the record is changed, and changes by editors are recorded in an audit log.

Sources and respect for others’ data

We prefer official portals, documented open data and information supplied by the organisation itself. We do not copy content from sites whose terms forbid it. Map locations come from OpenStreetMap and are credited.