Editorial standards
The rules every page here is written against, published so a reader can hold us to them.
Nothing publishes unchecked
No page goes live until someone other than its writer has checked every factual claim in it. Until that has happened the page says, in its byline, that it has not been fact-checked.
Subject areas are assigned to named checkers. Where we do not have someone qualified to check a subject — several faith traditions, classical dance and music, Indian tax and property law — we do not publish that subject. Guessing is not one of the options.
Sourcing
- Any high-risk claim needs two named sources. Ritual detail, religious statement, provenance, GI status and historical dating are all high-risk.
- Sources are listed on the page, named. Never "various sources".
- If a claim cannot be verified and nobody can be found who can verify it, it is left out. A shorter page that is right beats a complete one that is guessing.
Religious claims
Four registers, never blurred:
| Register | How we signal it |
|---|---|
| Scriptural | The text, the chapter, and which translation |
| Traditional | Which tradition, and where |
| Popular | "Many families believe" — never written as doctrine |
| Scholarly | A citation, and a range rather than a single year |
We never adjudicate. We do not say which reading is correct, whether a practice is "really" Vedic, or whether a community's understanding of itself is historically accurate.
Regional variation
Every article carries a section on how the practice changes across at least three regions. This is required, not optional. Describing the North Indian version as though it were the only version is the single most common failure in writing about India, and it is the one thing that most reliably tells a reader from Kerala or Bengal that a site was not written with them in mind.
Caste
Caste is never used as decoration, as a synonym for a craft family, or as an explanation of skill. A community is named only as it names itself, and only where it matters to the subject. Where a historical source uses colonial vocabulary we quote it, date it and frame it. Where a craft's practitioners are poorly paid or their children are leaving the trade, we say so.
Language
Banned outright: "ancient", "5,000-year-old", "since time immemorial", "authentic", "the real X", "passed down through generations", and bare collective subjects such as "Hindus believe" or "Indians think". If we cannot name who, where and when, we do not know it well enough to write it.
Corrections
Errors are corrected on the page, with the date, rather than quietly edited away. Anything that changes the meaning of a page is noted at the foot of it.
Review dates
Pages whose subject matter moves — anything in the NRI section, festival dates, temple timings — carry the date they were checked and the date they are due to be checked again. A page past its review date comes down rather than sitting there wrong.