Editorial policy
This page describes how material on jc-church.org is produced, checked and corrected. It is meant to be short enough to read in full and plain enough to hold us to.
How material is produced
Articles are checked against primary sources before publication. Where a text, a document or a record exists, we work from it rather than from summaries of it, and we name the source in the article so that a reader can go and look at the same thing we looked at.
Where a claim could not be verified, the article says so rather than stating it anyway. A sentence marked as unverified is not a hint that it is probably true; it means we looked and did not find sufficient grounds, and we would rather leave the gap visible than fill it.
What we treat as a primary source
Depending on the subject, that generally means original texts and translations of them, published minutes and official statements, archival documents, and first-hand accounts attributed to a named person. Where a claim rests on something weaker than that, the article should make the weakness plain in the body of the text, not only in a footnote.
How material is corrected
Corrections are made on the page itself; we do not quietly delete published material. A correction is written into the article, so that someone arriving later reads the corrected version and can see that a change was made rather than discovering a silently different text.
This applies to factual errors of every size, from a misspelled name to a mistaken attribution to a claim that turns out not to be supported by the source we cited. It also applies when a correction makes an earlier conclusion untenable; in that case the article is corrected rather than removed.
Reporting an error
To report an error, write to the address on the contact page. It helps if you can say which page you are writing about, quote the sentence you think is wrong, and point to the source you are relying on. A link to a document is more useful to us than a general objection, because it lets us check the same material directly.
Scope of this page
This policy covers articles published on jc-church.org. It describes our working practice for producing and correcting material, and nothing on this page is intended to state any further commitment beyond what is written above.