Fact-Checking and Corrections

Every factual claim on this site is meant to be traceable to something a reader can check. This page describes how that is enforced before publication, and what happens when it fails.

What is checked before a page is published

Sources are opened and verified. A cited URL is loaded before it is used. Links that redirect to a parent page, or that no longer resolve, are replaced rather than published. This has already caught a citation that silently redirected away from the page it claimed to reference.

Claims are matched to the source that supports them. A general reference to a regulator is not evidence for a specific figure. Where a page states a rule, the source has to state that rule.

Reasoning is separated from sourcing. Where a page reasons past what a source says — an inference about how a supplier will behave, a judgement about which trade term suits a buyer — that is written as reasoning, not dressed as a cited fact.

Structural checks run at build time. The site does not build if a page is missing a title, a description or a canonical URL, if two indexable pages share a title or description, if an internal link points to a page that does not exist, or if structured data fails to parse. These are mechanical checks and they catch mechanical errors, not wrong facts.

What the checks do not catch

Build-time validation confirms that a page is well-formed and that its links resolve. It does not confirm that a claim is true.

The current guides are editorial syntheses pending named-author review, as set out in the editorial policy. Until that review is recorded on a page, treat its factual claims as sourced but not independently verified, and confirm anything you are about to act on against the cited source.

This is also why jurisdiction-specific figures — duty rates, classification codes, certification requirements — are described as mechanisms rather than quoted as values. A worked example on this site shows the shape of a calculation. It is not a rate to file.

Reporting an error

Send three things to the editorial address in the footer:

1. The page URL
2. The exact sentence you are disputing
3. A source that supports the correction

Those three make a report checkable immediately. Reports without a source are still read, but they take longer, because the checking has to start from nothing.

What happens next

The disputed sentence is checked against the source you supplied and against the source the page already cites. One of four things follows:

• The claim is wrong. It is corrected, and the page’s update date moves. Where the original was materially misleading, the page says what changed rather than editing silently.
• The claim is right but unclear. The wording is fixed. If the meaning did not change, the update date does not move.
• The claim is out of date. Treated as wrong, because a reader acting on it would be misled.
• The claim stands. You get an answer explaining why, with the source it rests on.

Corrections are scoped to the disputed claim. A single wrong sentence is fixed as a sentence; it is not used as a reason to quietly rewrite the surrounding conclusions.

Where to send it

The editorial contact is the address in the site footer. It is monitored for source errors, broken claims and correction requests.

It is not a sourcing desk. It will not quote, broker or introduce a supplier, and requests of that kind will not be answered.