Verification policy

What counts as verification

1. 1

   The source must be the producer's own site

   For anything a company declares about itself — where it manufactures, where it hosts, how long the warranty runs — the citation has to live on a domain that company owns. The validator enforces this: mark a source as coming from the producer and point it at a blog post, and the build fails.

2. 2

   The page must say it, in words we can quote

   Each piece of evidence carries a verbatim quote. If the sentence cannot be quoted, the claim is not verified — it is reported at best, and reported evidence is capped at 60% of its value.

3. 3

   The date is part of the claim

   Every source records the day it was retrieved. That date is what makes a claim auditable later, and what drives the decay curve: full value for 12 months, then progressively less.

4. 4

   Ownership goes to the register

   Company control is the one thing we do not take a company's word for when we can avoid it. Registers, filings and regulator disclosures outrank the About page.

5. 5

   Contradictions are shown, not resolved quietly

   Where sources disagree, the claim is marked disputed with a note explaining the conflict. Disputed claims score zero — the point is to surface the disagreement, not to pick a winner.

Current state of the library

These numbers are computed at build time from the content itself, not maintained by hand. When they look bad, they are supposed to.

Re-verification

A claim does not stay true because it was true once. Records surface for re-checking when any source passes 12 months, when a product changes generation, or when someone reports a change. The re-check is the same process as the first check, and it updates the retrieval date rather than adding a second opinion.

The failure mode this is designed against is well documented in other directories: a browser listed as Norwegian years after its owner changed continent, a service listed as EU-hosted after it migrated. Neither entry was ever a lie. Both were simply never checked again.