Public knowledge governance ยท reviewed July 2026

Editorial Policy

How FactNot handles sourcing, AI-assisted work, public verification, discoverability, corrections, challenges, and human review.

01

Sourcing and citation

Public facts must give readers enough source metadata to inspect the evidence without exposing private captures, collaborator material, or restricted source bodies.

  • Discoverable facts require at least one publicly exposable HTTP or HTTPS citation.
  • Citation metadata may include title, publisher, publication date, source type, license, and outbound URL.
  • A citation is not an endorsement, and a public citation never makes a private source body public.
02

AI-assisted work is labeled by role

AI can help collect, structure, compare, translate, or assess material, but it does not receive independent authority to publish a fact or conceal the basis of an answer.

  • AI-generated or AI-assisted analysis should remain distinguishable from source text and human-authored conclusions.
  • Model output is treated as working analysis, not as a citation.
  • Public publication and rights decisions remain bound to authorized human actions.
03

Verification communicates limits

A public assessment is a versioned evaluation of the available evidence. It is not a guarantee of truth and must not be presented without its status, checked date, and methodology.

  • Only completed verification summaries provide a public score.
  • Historical assessments retain the method and weights used at the time.
  • Material updates should trigger a new review instead of silently reusing a stale result.
04

Human review and discoverability

Public-by-link availability does not automatically qualify a fact for search discovery. Discoverability is an explicit staff-controlled editorial state with additional quality and safety gates.

  • Private, archived, demo, revoked, and restricted records are excluded.
  • Incomplete verification or missing public citations blocks discovery.
  • Initial expansion is cohort-based so privacy, quality, crawlability, and correction behavior can be reviewed before scale.
05

Corrections and challenges

Readers must have a visible route to provide counter-evidence or challenge an assessment. Reviewed outcomes should remain attached to the public record when publication is appropriate.

  • Challenges are reviewed for evidence, relevance, safety, and privacy before a public outcome is shown.
  • Significant corrections update the fact and its checked context rather than erasing the existence of earlier review.
  • A privacy, safety, or rights restriction can remove a URL from discovery while preserving a neutral response to unauthorized requests.