Every claim has a source, or nothing gets made
Your credibility is the asset. One wrong number in a documentary is the top comment for the next two years, and it attaches to your channel, not to ours.
Production is blocked while any flag is open
This is not a checklist somebody ticks at the end. It is a gate the pipeline cannot walk past.
The script is broken into claims
Every factual statement becomes its own row. A sentence with two numbers in it is two claims.Each claim gets a source and a tier
A real source, at a stated level of authority. A claim with no citable source cannot be verified and holds the gate.Five integrity checks run on each claim
Not “does a source exist” — five separate questions about whether the source says what the script says.The count of open flags is computed, never stored
It is recounted from the rows every time it is read, because a flag somebody set is a flag somebody can forget to unset. Production runs at zero, and only at zero.
It says needs you
You see the claim, the flag, and the choice: source it, correct it, or remove it. In plain language, with the sentence in front of you.
A correction rewrites the sentence rather than deleting the claim, so the script keeps its shape and you can see exactly what changed.
One of the delivery checks is that every claim shows its citation while it is being spoken. A sourced script that ships as an unsourced video does not count as sourced.
Having a source is the easy part
Most wrong numbers on the internet have a source. They have the wrong unit, or the right figure from the wrong year, or a projection presented as a measurement.
| Check | The question it asks |
|---|---|
| value | Does the source actually state this number? |
| unit & magnitude | Is the unit right, and is the magnitude right (thousand vs million)? |
| date & vintage | What date does this figure belong to, and is that the date we imply? |
| basis | Is this measured, modelled, or projected? |
| scope | Which country, which population, which timeframe does it cover? |
A check that did not run counts as unverified, and unverified holds the gate exactly like a failure does.
Where a fact came from is part of the fact
A company filing and a magazine profile are not the same evidence, and a viewer deserves to know which one they are looking at.
Tier 1 · Primary
Primary — filings, court records, institutional archives, wire copy
Tier 2 · Archive
Archive — newspaper archives, reference works
Tier 3 · Press
Press — later reporting, documentaries
Wikipedia is never cited
It is a good place to start reading and a bad place to stop. The engine follows a Wikipedia page to its own footnotes and cites those instead — the filing, the archive, the report the article was built from.
This is enforced in code, not written in a style guide. A Wikipedia URL attached to a claim is rejected as a source and the claim stays open.
A page you can link
Every episode ships with a public sources page: the claim, the source, the tier, and the date the figure belongs to. Put it in your description.
- It is proof for the sceptical viewer who checks.
- It is a defence if a claim is ever challenged.
- It is the thing almost no channel in this category has.
We have no customer testimonials to show you. This is the social proof we would rather have anyway.
What the proof gate does not claim
- It does not make us always right. It makes every claim checkable by you, before it is published and after.
- It cannot verify an opinion, a prediction, or a story with no record behind it. Those are marked as what they are rather than dressed up as facts.
- A topic scoring below 40% on sourceability is refused before writing starts. Some good stories cannot be proved, and we would rather say so than write them anyway.
- Sourcing takes real time. It is part of why an episode has an honest ETA rather than a spinner.
Claims you can defend
Every episode ships with the page that backs it up. Start with one video and read the sources before you publish.