Sourcing policy

Status: working version, October 2026. Licence: CC-BY 4.0.

What counts as a source

Only publicly accessible documents are used: court rulings and filings, regulators' decisions, parliamentary and official inquiries, statutes and government documents, peer-reviewed research, reports by established civil-society organisations, and journalism. Nothing is taken from leaked or breached data, from closed or login-only platforms, or from private social-media content.

Source tiers

Every source is assigned a tier by its publisher's domain:

Tiers describe the kind of publisher, not the truth of a particular claim. An investigative report can be more accurate than an official statement; the claims matrix of each case-file records which sources support which claim.

Thresholds

Personal data

The following is never collected or published: photographs of people, home addresses and contact details, medical diagnoses tied to identifiable people, financial account data, identity-document data, social-media content, and anything that identifies a child. Where a source itself identifies a child (for example a court docket caption), the source is not cited publicly.

Archiving

Where retrieval allows, sources for case-files are archived (Internet Archive Wayback Machine) so that the record survives changes to the original page.

Domain lists

The tier lists used by the collection pipeline:

Primary

Secondary

Tertiary