Editorial standards

Reader-facing summary. The operational version with regex enforcement lives at editorial/CONTENT_AUTHENTICITY_POLICY.md in our repository.

What we promise

• Every indexed article is editor-reviewed. Every page that appears in our sitemap or RSS feed has passed a named editor's substantive review against primary sources.
• Editorial process is disclosed per article. Each article's frontmatter records the review level applied (none, outline, review, full-rewrite). Misdisclosure is editorial misconduct.
• First-hand sources are listed. Each article carries one or more URLs the reviewing editor personally checked against the primary source.
• Drafts are never indexed. Articles awaiting editorial review live under /_drafts/, are excluded from our sitemap and RSS, and emit noindex,nofollow,noarchive.

Why the policy exists

Search engines — Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Qwant — have moved against content produced "at scale" with the primary purpose of manipulating rankings. Google's March 2024 spam policy update is the clearest written enforcement: "scaled content abuse" applies regardless of how the content was produced. The trigger is scale without value.

We are deliberately a small, slow site. Our editorial cap is five articles per week per editor at the highest review tier. Below that, the cap is determined by editor capacity. This is structural — not a vibes-based promise.

The four review tiers

none

The editor wrote every word from scratch.

outline

The editor used a working outline as a starting point. All prose is the editor's own.

review

An initial draft was prepared from primary sources. The editor materially rewrote (≥ 30% of words substantively changed) and added at least one first-hand observation.

full-rewrite

An initial draft existed. The editor reviewed line by line, verified every citation against the primary source, and added first-hand expertise.

Build-time enforcement

Our CI runs five audits on every pull request and a sixth nightly. Any failure blocks merge to main:

Content audit (scripts/content-audit.mjs)

Indexed articles must contain zero phrases from our blocked-pattern list (e.g. "delve into", "in today's digital landscape", "a testament to"). They must also carry a named reviewer, a substantive (≥ 30 character) contribution description, and at least one first-hand source URL.

Freshness audit (scripts/freshness-check.mjs)

Indexed articles older than 12 months (per lastReviewed) hard-fail the build; articles older than 9 months trigger a warning and a visible "review overdue" banner.

Duplicate audit (scripts/duplicate-check.mjs)

We hash every paragraph (≥ 12 words) across all articles. If the same paragraph appears in two indexed articles, the build fails. This catches the "scaled content abuse" pattern even when individual phrases pass the editorial-tell filter.

Link integrity (scripts/link-check.mjs)

Every outbound URL in an indexed article is probed (HEAD, then GET on 405/403). Any 4xx/5xx response on an indexed article hard-fails the build. Network timeouts produce warnings. Runs nightly on a cron in case external sources rot.

SEO audit (scripts/seo-audit.mjs)

After build, verifies: (a) every indexed article appears in the sitemap, (b) no draft appears in the sitemap, (c) every built page has exactly one self-referential canonical, (d) every indexed article has valid Schema.org JSON-LD with author Person and publisher Organization, (e) no indexed article is orphaned (every indexed article has at least one internal link to another indexed article).

The blocked-pattern list, the regex enforcement, and the freshness ceiling all live in scripts under scripts/ in our public repository.

How to flag a suspicious article

If an indexed article reads like it slipped through the gate, mail editor@webaccessibility.wiki with the URL and the passage you are concerned about. We re-audit; if the gate slipped, we move the article back to draft pending re-review and log the incident in our quarterly transparency report.

Quarterly audit

Each quarter we re-run the audit, sample 10% of indexed articles for manual spot-check, and cross-check that the first-hand-source URLs still resolve. Results are published in our transparency report.

Currently indexed

Our public corpus and draft queue counts are reported in the quarterly transparency report. Drafts are visible to editors at /_drafts/; they are not visible to search engines.