Editorial Policy

Nothing publishes automatically

Every entry in /reports/ was written or reviewed by an editor before it appeared. The Contribute form has no code path that writes directly to the public catalog — a human reads every submission and decides what happens to it.

Review states

• Received — the submission has arrived via the Contribute form (see how it's collected) and is queued for review. No public trace of it exists yet.
• Under review — an editor checks the proposal against the Source & Confidence Criteria: are the claims sourced, is the scope clear, does it fit the catalog.
• Revisions requested — the editor contacts the contributor by email with specific, concrete requests (missing sourcing, scope, factual concerns). The piece stays unpublished until resubmitted.
• Accepted — the piece is edited into a data/reports.json entry with status: "draft", attributed to an author profile in data/authors.json, and enters the editorial workflow (see below) before going live.
• Declined — the contributor is notified with a brief reason. Declined material is not stored as report content.
• Published — the entry's status is switched to "published" as part of a reviewed, merged change to the site's Git repository, which is what makes it appear on /reports/.

How publishing works technically

Report and author data live as version-controlled files in the site's Git repository (data/reports.json, data/authors.json). The editorial admin panel at /admin (Decap CMS, see Contact for access) edits those files through an editorial workflow: a change starts as a draft, moves to "in review," and is only merged into the live branch — and therefore only live on the site — after that review step. Every change is a Git commit with a visible history; nothing bypasses that path. See docs/OPERATIONS.md in the repository for the operator-facing walkthrough.

What we will not do

• Invent, complete or "fill in" historical facts that are not in a cited source.
• Present an unverified or single-source claim as confirmed.
• Publish a contributor's draft without their knowledge, or edit it beyond factual/clarity corrections without checking back with them for anything substantive.
• Attribute a report to an author who did not write or explicitly approve it.