Charter · standards the desk applies to itself
1. Purpose
The purpose of this charter is to make the desk's own practice checkable. It is not a professional standard, not a regulatory code and not a claim of oversight by any body. It is a public statement of internal rules, published so that a reader who finds the material falling short has something specific to point at.
2. Accuracy and sourcing
- Any statement about a duty names the instrument, code or record behind it.
- Primary records outrank descriptions of them; a press release is treated as a signpost, not a source.
- Where a primary record could not be reached, the chapter says which level of evidence it is using.
- Definitions, reference periods and revision status are read before any figure is used.
- Practice that varies between newsrooms is labelled as convention rather than requirement.
- Institutions are named neutrally, with no claim of membership, approval, accreditation or supervision.
3. The boundary against advice
Every draft receives a boundary read whose only purpose is to find sentences that function as advice about a specific situation. Describing what a statute governs is within scope. Telling a reader that their sentence is safe, that a defence applies, or that a source may be identified is not, and any paragraph doing so is rewritten as a description or removed.
The same boundary applies to correspondence. The desk answers questions about its own chapters and declines questions asking for a decision about a reader's article, source, complaint or legal position, saying why and pointing at the kind of professional who can answer.
4. No invented people, no borrowed voices
The site uses no fictional named individuals, no composite characters, no invented quotations and no stock photographs of people. Examples describe roles: a planning desk, a verification reader, an operator's spokesperson, a person who attended a meeting. Chapters are published under the desk's collective responsibility rather than personal bylines, and no staff names or photographs appear anywhere.
This is consistency rather than modesty. The chapters argue that inventing a person to illustrate a point is fabrication, so the site cannot decorate itself with invented people while making that argument.
5. Independence
No advertising, sponsorship, affiliate arrangement, paid placement or gift influences any chapter, and none is accepted. No organisation named in the material pays anything, and no outside body sees a chapter before publication or directs its content. The site is funded from the ordinary resources of the operating company named in the colophon.
Should any of that ever change, the change would be stated on the about page and in this charter before it took effect, and any material affected would carry a disclosure. There is no current arrangement of any kind to disclose.
6. Worked examples
Examples use neutral units: words, sentences, items, minutes, hours, days and percentages. No example uses a monetary amount, because attaching sums to editorial decisions turns a description of practice into something that reads as financial guidance, which is outside the desk's competence and its purpose.
7. Corrections
Corrections are logged on receipt with the date, page and disputed sentence, assessed against the underlying record rather than the draft, and answered within five working days. Four outcomes are recorded distinctly: a typographical fix, logged without annotation; a clarification, noted; a correction of fact, dated and described on the page; a retraction, which removes the claim and says so.
Correction counts are reviewed periodically to look for patterns rather than individual faults: the same kind of figure, the same body's changing name, the same type of over-confident sentence. A pattern is treated as a process problem, and the process is changed rather than the sentence alone.
8. Review
Technique chapters are re-read annually. Any chapter naming a statute, a code or a regulator is re-read whenever that instrument is amended or a body is renamed or given new functions, and annually in any case. Each review checks that internal links resolve, that named bodies still exist under that name and remit, that no sentence has drifted into advice, and that each checklist still matches the sections above it.
9. Accessibility as an editorial duty
Structure is part of accuracy. Every table carries a caption, every image carries meaningful alternative text or is marked decorative, headings run in order, sections are numbered, and the reading rail on long chapters points only at anchors that exist. A chapter that cannot be read by somebody using a screen reader has failed as writing, not merely as markup.
10. Language and readability
Chapters are written for an informed general reader in Irish and British spelling, in paragraphs of roughly seventy to a hundred and forty words, with numbered sections and no promotional adjectives. Superlatives, rankings and words such as best or guaranteed are not used, because a teaching note that oversells itself teaches the wrong habit along with the content. Where a term of art is unavoidable it is defined in the glossary rather than explained twice.
11. What this charter does not do
It does not create a right of appeal, a complaints tribunal or an entitlement to a correction. It does not make the desk a regulated publisher, and it confers no status on the material. It does not promise that every chapter is currently perfect; it promises a stated method, an honest correction route and a plain account of what the site will not do.
How to hold this charter to account
- Ask which instrument, code or record a statement about a duty rests on.
- Ask whether a sentence you are reading is description or advice, and report it if it is advice.
- Report any table without a caption, image without alternative text or link that does not resolve.
- Report an institution described as approving, accrediting or supervising this site.
- Report a worked example that uses money or an invented named person.
- Expect a reply within five working days and a dated note where a fact changes.