Editorial policy

1. Sourcing: official, named, linkable

A fact is published only if it can be traced to a primary official source: a Government Gazette, a department or public entity's own publication, a provincial education or licensing notice, or an official portal. Every record carries that source URL, so a reader can check the claim without trusting us.

Media reports are used to find out that something happened, never as the basis for a published date. Where a date is widely reported but no official source has published it, the record stays unpublished or is published with an explicit "not officially announced" status.

We do not scrape search engines, we do not copy text from other websites, and we do not republish full government documents that carry their own copyright. Where a document matters, we summarise the facts and link to it.

2. Verification and the review clock

Each record holds two dates that a reader can inspect: last verified, the day a human opened the official source and confirmed the record still matches it, and next review, the day it must be checked again. The interval depends on how volatile the date is - a public holiday published in a gazette gets a long interval, a grant payment schedule gets a short one, and a deadline that has an annual cycle is re-checked before each cycle opens.

A record whose review date has passed is visibly marked rather than silently trusted. Where officials have announced something without a date, the record says "date not yet announced" and carries the reason. We would rather leave a field empty than fill it with a plausible guess.

3. When official sources disagree

It happens, and it is worth seeing. Where two official sources publish different dates, we record both, describe the conflict in plain language, and state which one a reader should plan around - which is almost always the earlier one, because arriving early never costs a place in a queue and arriving late always does.

A current example is the NSFAS 2027 application closing date, announced at a ministerial launch as one date while the application guide showed another. Both are published on the grants and bursaries pages with the conflict named. The alternative - quietly picking one - would hide the single most useful thing we know about that deadline.

4. Automation is not a publisher

Scheduled checks watch approved official sources, hash what they find, and raise a change for review. They do not publish. Changes to legal, tax, grant, immigration, election or safety-critical information always require a human decision, and the human decision is recorded in the same history as the change.

This is deliberate. A single automated mismatch - a cached page, a reordered table, a reformatted PDF - could otherwise publish a wrong tax deadline to thousands of people with no one reviewing it.

5. What we will not publish

• Fake services. No tool that pretends to check a status, verify a document or act for a department.
• Impersonation. No government logos, no official-looking seals, no wording that implies we are a public body.
• Scraped or spun content. No content generated by rewriting another site's article, and no mass-produced pages differentiated only by a province or a keyword.
• Speculation dressed as information. No predicted dates, no "expected to be announced" presented as a date, no clickbait headlines that the page does not answer.
• Paid placement in editorial content. Sponsorship, if it ever exists, is labelled and kept out of guides, dates and listings.
• Personal data. No page collects an ID number, a CV, a bank detail or a password, and none is accepted by email either.

6. Where automation assists, and where it stops

Tooling helps us watch sources, diff changes, check that links still resolve and format records consistently. It does not write the guides, decide what a date means, or choose what gets published. Guides are written and reviewed by a person, and any guide that relies on a volatile figure (a tax threshold, a grant amount, a fee) names the date that figure was checked.

7. Reader corrections

Readers catch things we miss, and reporting an error is welcome rather than tolerated. The corrections policy sets out what happens when you tell us something is wrong, including how the change is recorded.