How we verify

Every claim on this site lives in a fact record before it reaches a page. A record names its source, the scope it applies to, the date we last checked it, any published expiry, and a confidence level. Pages reference those records; they do not restate them as undated prose.

The one date we cannot always supply is the source’s own. Many official pages carry no publication date at all — 52 of our 137 records are in that position. Where that is the case the page says source page carries no publication date rather than printing nothing, because a blank there is indistinguishable from a fault. Our own re-check date is always shown.

The wording of a source is not reproduced on the page. Most of these documents are published in Chinese, and a translation of ours sitting where a citation belongs would be a paraphrase we had quietly made authoritative. Instead every record on a page shows who published it, what kind of document it is, how far it reaches, when we checked it, and a link to read it in the original.

“Desk-verified” means we inspected the source. It does not mean we crossed the border, used the card or completed the booking. A record whose expiry has passed, or which has not been re-checked in six months, is flagged on every page that cites it.

We publish a page only when the facts behind it exist. Modules with no sourced records say so rather than filling the gap with plausible-sounding text.