How a fact gets onto this site

Article

Every number on this site — a monthly fee, a country availability, an eligibility rule — went through the same path before it appeared.

A fact starts as a claim attached to a product. A claim on its own is not publishable. It carries a risk tier derived from what it asserts: fees, country availability, licence and protection statements, investment access, closures, warnings and safety claims are all classified high risk automatically, based on the field name rather than on anyone’s judgement of the individual value.

A high-risk claim cannot become public without evidence. Evidence is a specific page, at a specific URL, recorded with the date it was actually retrieved. Not the date the record was created, and not the date someone believed the information was true — the date the page was read.

Both the claim and the evidence must then be approved, and they are approved separately. This matters more than it sounds. A claim can be approved in good faith and its source later found to be wrong, withdrawn, or misread. When the evidence is rejected, the fact stops being displayed even though the claim itself is still marked approved. The two decisions are independent because they answer different questions.

The publication gate enforces both. It runs before the database row is written, not after, and it applies to every path into the system — the admin screen, the import tool, the command line, and scheduled jobs. A record with one unevidenced high-risk fact cannot be published by anyone, including an administrator holding every permission on the site.

What this does not mean: it does not mean every fact here is current. A source checked six months ago may have changed since. Each fact shows the date it was retrieved so you can judge that yourself, and where a page did not state something, nothing is recorded rather than an estimate being filled in.