How we check facts

Three statuses, and nothing between them

◆Verified

A primary source — the text of a law, a government release, a statistics agency, a court decision with a number — or two independent secondary sources.

◆Estimate

One secondary source, an industry estimate with a disclosed method, or a calculation of ours. A calculation of ours is an estimate even when every input to it is verified, because the model is our assumption.

◆Unverified

A figure that circulates in the market with no traceable origin. It is published only with the label and with an explanation of why we quote it at all and what is wrong with it.

A status belongs to a statement, not to a piece. One piece can hold fourteen verified statements, three estimates and one unverified, and the summary of that sits in the margin of the piece.

Which of this is enforced

Four of the rules are not a matter of intention. They are conditions of the build: a piece that breaks one does not become a page.

1. A statement marked verified without a source, or without the date it was verified, is rejected by the schema every piece is validated against. The site does not compile.
2. A piece whose author and fact-checker are the same person is stopped by the editorial gate. A veto held by the author is not a veto.
3. A date of last review that falls in the future is an error. A review older than a year raises a warning against the piece.
4. A piece that states figures in its text but records none of them as checkable statements is stopped.

Sources are ranked A to D

Every source in the register carries a tier. The tier is printed under the piece, beside the source, together with the date we opened it.

A

Primary. The text of a law or regulation on an official portal, a release from a government body, statistics from an agency such as BPS or Bank Indonesia, a court decision with a case number, a report that discloses its method.

B

Quality secondary. Established news organisations and large consultancies reporting on a primary document.

C

Everything else.

D

Not usable. A figure may not rest on it.

A number marked verified rests on a tier A or B source. A blog retelling a law is not the law, and a news story about a release is not the release. Each entry in the register carries its publisher, its address, the date we opened it and, where one exists, an archived copy — because a source can change a figure after the fact.

The fact-checker is not the author

Fact-checking is a separate role with the power to stop a piece before publication, and it is not merged into the editing job. The check is made against the wording of the primary document, never against a retelling of it.

When thirty-five key statements in our own preparatory material were checked, four turned out to be wrong: a statistic whose source did not exist, two benchmark numbers read the wrong way round, a national figure quoted as if it described Bali, and a regulation dated wrongly.

None of the four came from carelessness. All four came from repeating a retelling. The only defence is opening the original, and that is what this role exists to do.

Every figure carries a date

Each piece carries the date it was last checked. Each rate we publish carries the date of its last review and the interval after which it has to be reviewed again, and the strip under the masthead shows those figures with the most recent of those dates. A figure without a review date is a figure nobody is answerable for.

If you think a figure is wrong

1. Name the piece and the figure, and give the document that says otherwise — the document itself, not an article about it.
2. We open that document and check the wording against ours.
3. If we were wrong, the piece is corrected and the correction is published with what changed, why, and who reported it. The piece keeps its address; nothing is deleted.

What we do not have yet is an address to send that to. There is none on this site, and rather than print one that does not work we say so here. When there is one, it will be named on this page.