How research gets made
This page walks through, in plain language, how a claim on this site goes from a question to something you can read and check. It’s a deeper, slower walk through the same ground as How we verify — read that page for the short version and the exact status words; read this one for how the pipeline actually works, step by step.
1. Sources first
Nothing gets written before the sources exist. Before a page is drafted, the questions it owes its reader an answer to are written down first, and research is gathered directly against real, citable material — government pages, public data, primary reports, published studies. A draft is never written first and sourced afterward to fit.
2. Turning sources into claims
A draft takes the sourced material and turns it into plain language — a claim, a figure, a fact, a quote. Every one of those load-bearing statements is tracked back to the specific source it came from, not just to a general sense of “we read about this somewhere.”
3. Verification, and what “sealed” really means
This is the hard gate, and it happens independently of whoever drafted the page. Every load-bearing claim is pulled back out of the draft, one at a time, and checked again directly against its original source — not against the draft’s own summary of that source. A copy of what was actually read is kept alongside the claim, so the backing doesn’t quietly rot if the original page later moves or disappears. Only once every claim on a page has cleared that check, with zero unresolved disagreements, does a page earn the word sealed. Short version: draft, then verify, then seal, then release in plain language — never out of that order.
4. Naming what we don’t know yet
Some things aren’t confirmed by the time a page needs to publish — a source that wouldn’t load, a figure only confirmed one way instead of two, a number a government office hasn’t released yet. When that happens, the page says so on its face, exactly where the gap is, instead of smoothing it over or rounding up to a confidence it hasn’t earned. An honest “we’re still checking this” is worth more here than a premature “confirmed.”
5. Every claim carries a receipt
The output of all this is a page you can check without trusting us: a claim, tied to a source, dated, with its verification status visible on its face. Receipts aren’t a footnote added at the end — they’re the reason the claim is allowed on the page at all.
6. When something turns out to be wrong: the corrections loop
A correction here is never a quiet edit. Once a claim is confirmed wrong or no longer solid, every page repeating it is found — by a systematic sweep across the whole site, not by memory — and updated together. The change is dated, and the old version stays visible with its history rather than being deleted. Anyone can start this loop: Corrections & improvements is the one open channel for it, and it’s read by a person every time.
7. Who — and what — writes this
AI tools are used throughout this pipeline, including to draft prose. That’s disclosed in full, not buried: How this was made. The short version is that the verification pipeline above exists precisely because AI systems can be confidently wrong — so nothing here is asked to be trusted because of who or what wrote it. A claim either traces to a real, checked source, or it says so on its face.
The full written standards
What’s above is the public shape of the method. Behind it sits a fuller set of written internal standards — among them a detailed rubric for judging a page’s honesty before it publishes, a data-retention schedule, and a cryptographic timestamping standard for proving when a claim was checked. Those documents exist today and are used today; they are internal, not public, while they’re still being finished and ruled on for release. They will be published, in whole or in relevant part, as each is cleared for that — this page will be updated when they are. The front door for that library is already open: Run this in your municipality — an invitation to build the same kind of knowledge-base for your own community, in your own name.
— The Unknown Soldier · uniteTOlove · Toronto