PUBLIC LANDS WATCH

Sourcing Standards

This registry documents threats to American public lands using verifiable, primary-source evidence only. It does not editorialize, speculate about motive, or use characterizing language. Every claim on every page can be traced to a specific, linked source.

Source hierarchy

  1. Primary government/legal sources — Federal Register notices, environmental impact statements, court filings and rulings, legislative text, agency statements, GAO/CBO reports, procurement records.
  2. Primary organizational sources — tribal government statements, named officials' direct, attributed statements.
  3. Secondary reporting — established news organizations with named reporters and editorial standards. Local outlets covering their own region are treated as high-value.
  4. Advocacy organization materials — used for framing and pointers to underlying data; factual claims are traced back to the primary document where possible.

Never used as sources: anonymous social posts, unlabeled aggregator content, opinion columns cited as fact, or any source a reader cannot independently verify.

No opinion, no characterization

Every sentence on this site must pass one test: could it be attributed to a specific named source, or is it this site's own conclusion? If it's the site's own conclusion, it either gets a citation or it doesn't get published. Quoted characterizations from sources are reported as quotes, not adopted as this site's language.

Corrections

Errors are never silently edited. Every page carries a dated corrections log at the bottom. When a fact is found to be wrong, it is struck through with the correction and date noted — not deleted.

Review process

This registry is currently maintained by one person. Every claim is checked against its cited source before publication, and the full source list for each page is published alongside it so any reader can perform the same check independently.

Submissions from contributors are reviewed against their cited sources before they are merged. A standing two-reviewer requirement — where no contributor, including the maintainer, can publish their own unreviewed additions — will be enforced through merge request approval once there is more than one reviewer. Until then, the corrections log and the public source list are the accountability mechanism. See Contribute for the submission process.