Source policy

Not all sources carry the same weight, and a profile that treats them as if they did is misleading even when every individual link works. Every source cited on this site is labelled with a tier, shown next to the citation on the profile itself.

Tier 1 — strong

• Government departments, regulators and public registries
• Court and other public records
• Major national newspapers and broadcasters
• Academic publications and established publishers
• Official awarding and accrediting bodies, for their own awards

Tier 2 — good

• Established specialist and industry publications
• Local newspapers with an identifiable editorial staff
• Professional associations and sector bodies

Tier 3 — supporting

• Smaller specialist outlets
• Self-published expert sources, where the author is identifiable and the subject is within their expertise

Tier 3 sources can support detail, but a profile is not published on tier 3 evidence alone.

First-party

A subject's own website, filings, press releases and social accounts. These are cited for what a subject says about itself — a founding year, a stated mission, a programme list — and are marked first-party wherever they appear. They are never presented as independent confirmation of the same claim.

Not cited

These are excluded regardless of what they happen to say:

• Business and school directories that aggregate unverified data
• Scraped or mirrored sites
• AI-generated content farms
• Anonymous blogs and SEO spam
• Content the subject paid to place, where that is detectable

Directory listings are sometimes useful as a research lead — a phone number to check, a detail to look for in a better source — but they do not appear in a citation list.

Domains that mislead

A trusted domain does not make a page trustworthy. Some publishers host paid or user-submitted material on the same domain as their journalism, and the URL gives no warning. Known cases:

• Forbes Councils (councils.forbes.com, and "Forbes Councils Member" bylines) are paid contributor posts, not Forbes journalism. Staff-written Forbes articles are tier 1; council posts are not cited at any tier.
• Press releases carried on news domains — wire reproductions and sponsored posts — are first-party material wherever they appear.
• Encyclopedias and wikis, including Wikipedia, are not cited. Where they are useful, it is as a pointer to a primary source, which we then read ourselves.

Check the byline and the page furniture, not the domain.

The rule the site is built on

Every source cited has been opened and read against the claim it supports. A link that exists is not evidence that it says what a draft claims it says. This check has already caught fabricated citations in our own drafts, and it is a required step before any profile is published.

A profile that cannot muster at least one tier 1 or tier 2 source is not published. This is enforced by the site's build: a profile whose sources are all first-party or tier 3 fails the build rather than going live.

Questions about a specific citation: corrections@factsledger.com.