Methodology

Scoring dimensions

The scoring model uses four public dimensions. Each one is designed to make the editorial assessment easier to inspect: what evidence supports the claim, how the statement treats democratic norms, whether the framing carries manipulation risk, and how confident the assessment can be.

• Truthfulness: a 0–5 star measure of how well the statement matches available evidence and context.
• Democratic norms: a 0–5 star measure of whether the statement aligns with pluralism, accountability, and institutional restraint.
• Propaganda risk: a 0–5 star measure of the likelihood that framing is misleading, manipulative, or strategically distorted.
• Confidence: a 0–5 star measure of how strong the available evidence base is for the assessment.

Star scale

The site uses a 0–5 star system so scoring stays visually legible without collapsing everything into a single verdict. Scores should be read alongside the source, context, and rationale rather than as standalone labels.

Person score averages

Person pages may show average truthfulness and democratic-norms scores from published, scored statements. These averages summarize the statements in the archive; they are not claims about whether a person is morally good or bad.

A small sample should be treated cautiously. The evidence list on each person page is more important than the average itself.

Statement-derived political profiles

Editors may tag individual published statements by political-orientation axis when the statement itself contains enough evidence to support that tag. The system can then summarize a person’s statement record once there are enough tagged statements across enough axes.

Events and sources are not politically scored. Public person profiles are derived from statement evidence and are not manual labels for the person.

Details and evidence

Statement and event pages use compact source and freshness cues by default, with deeper provenance available through Details/Evidence controls. The goal is for readers to understand what the site claims, why it believes it, and whether a human reviewed it without turning public pages into audit reports.

Editorial rules

• Every important statement should be linked to a source.
• Quotes, context, and interpretation should be visibly separated.
• Editorial review comes before publication of any sensitive analysis.

Related policies

The methodology explains the scoring model. The editorial and corrections policies explain how source handling, human review, updates, and mistakes should be handled across the site.