How it’s verified

The corpus is a research archive on how countries are governed: institutions and their design, key decisions and who made them under what constraints, policy machinery, elite and succession dynamics, and the contestation over rule. It aims to be useful to both a sympathetic insider and a critical outsider, so contested questions are presented as contested, with each account in its own words.

Verification status

Every document carries one of three statuses. Current totals across 863 documents:

• Verified 47: Passed Tier-1 fact-check and promotion review; no open verification flags block it.
• Fact-checked 813: Tier-1 fact-check done (sampled claims verified against sources, corrections applied). Remaining gaps are flagged inline as Unverified.
• Draft 3: Researched and written; not yet through Tier-1 fact-check.

The audits

Tier-1 is a per-document fact-check. An auditor samples at least 20 checkable claims (dates, statistics, names and offices, institutional facts) plus every direct quotation, and checks each against sources. A claim may only be corrected where a fetched source supports the correction, and quotations that cannot be sourced verbatim are converted to attributed paraphrase. Each audit is kept on file with its evidence.

Tier-2 audits a whole block of documents together, catching what single-document checks cannot: two documents that each passed Tier-1 but disagree with each other, uneven tone, over-reliance on one source, and coverage gaps.

Open flags stay visible

When a claim, figure or quotation cannot yet be verified, it is not smoothed into confident prose. It is flagged in place, like casualty estimates range from 40 to several hundred; sources conflict, and stays flagged until a source closes it. The corpus currently carries 23,024 open flags. A high count on a recent-events document is expected and honest: much of 2025–2026 cannot yet be checked against settled sources.

Document levels

• Level 1 Anchor: a foundational document for its block, 10,000–14,000 words, widely cross-referenced.
• Level 2: a substantive thematic document, 8,000–11,000 words.
• Level 3: a focused biography or single-event document, 5,000–8,000 words.

Codes

Each document has a code such as MY-H-PM-04: country, block, optional sub-block, number. Block letters share a convention (A–D eras, E economy, F foreign policy, G social policy, H biographies, I institutions, J contested legacies, K key decisions, M ideas, N external lens, O megatrends, R canon), but their exact meaning is set per country. Codes in the text link straight to the document they name.