Independence

What this record is made of, what it is not made of, and how the difference is kept.

What this record contains

• Dated observations of documents published by public authorities and standards bodies. Each one records the address that answered rather than the address that was asked, and the day it answered. Derived — collect_status_evidence.py records the answered address, and identify() in escalate.py asks the content whether the response is the artifact that was requested, because a status code asserts transport and never artifact identity.
• A digest of the retained text, where the publisher’s own terms permit retention. Where they do not, the document is cited and linked and its words are not reproduced. Derived — the licence class recorded on each entry, and quotefidelity.py, whose subject is the built artifact rather than the code that wrote it.
• Claims that classify or relate, each carrying the publisher’s own words and the address they were read at. A claim missing either renders nothing, the way an absent status renders an em dash. Derived — authorship.py, with the 14-word ceiling held in one place, quote_cap.py, and imported by every path that quotes.
• Relations, only where a publisher states one about its own document, with the act the statement was read from. Derived — lineagecheck.py refuses a relation whose evidence is this archive’s own prose, however accurate that prose is.
• Corrections, added and dated beside what they correct. Nothing published about a document is silently edited. Policy, with the record beside it — corrections are added and dated at corrections, and `test_corrections_selector.py` asserts that each one is reachable there. That a published claim was never silently edited is an undertaking about how this record is kept; no gate measures it.

What this record does not contain

Every line in this block is a policy. A sentence asserting that something is absent from every page would be a claim about every page, and this record does not publish claims it cannot show the working for. What follows is an undertaking about authorship, with the gated arms named.

• No employer. No employer name appears in this repository, in the built site, or in a commit message, in any form. Gated arm, and one arm of it did not run — firewallcheck.py checks that the out-of-bounds sibling repository is named nowhere but its own declaration and in no commit message; both of those ran and held. Its third arm is a census over a forbidden-term list held outside this repository, that list is not reachable here, so the census did not run and this record holds no measurement of whether a listed term is present. The gate reports that state and does not stop the build on it. The line above is therefore a policy for the term arm and a measurement for the other two.
• No customer, and no third party’s private material. Every source here is a document its own publisher published openly, at an address this record records and links.
• No confidential material. Every entry declares its provenance as public, and the content schema takes that as a literal rather than as a list of permitted values, so any other value fails the build rather than warning. Derived, with its limit stated — the literal refuses an entry that declares itself non-public. It cannot prove an entry that declares itself public. A declaration is not a measurement, and printing this line without that clause would be the broader claim borrowing the narrower one’s evidence.
• No non-public implementation detail. Nothing here describes the construction, configuration or operation of any system, other than this record’s own machinery, which is described on Developers with the schema, the endpoints and both feeds.
• No firsthand incident. Nothing here reports an event this record witnessed. What is reported is what a publisher published, and the day this record read it.
• No natural person, ever. Bodies, not people. Where a committee or working group is described, the source is an organisational structure page — parent body, secretariat, scope, liaisons — never a roster. Gated arm — personacheck.py, on three arms: a persona this repository has itself declared, an addressing construction bound to a role designator, and a machine surface declaring an audience. A fourth arm was built from a vocabulary of occupational nouns, measured against this corpus and dropped: every occurrence was a body, a document title, a publisher quote or an address, and a term that fires only on honest prose is not a discriminator. So the gate proves that no view is addressed to a role. It does not prove that no person is named.

How it derives

Three layers, in the order the work happens.

Deterministic observation

The same fetch, the same normalisation and the same digest, every night, recorded whether or not anything moved. A failed read is recorded as that day’s fact before any step that depends on it runs, and a read that could not be taken is filed as unmeasured rather than as a finding of nothing.

Derived — is_unmeasured() in errclass.py keeps the unmeasured class apart from the negative one. Merging them is how a check teaches an operator to ignore it: the first live run of one such check reported two feeds stale that were byte-perfect on retry.

Labeled derivation

Anything computed here carries the rule that computed it and the population it was computed over. A figure with no denominator does not ship, and a figure rendered on a page is checked against the store it was derived from rather than against the formula that wrote it.

Derived — denominator.py refuses a published figure that does not carry its population, and renderedfigures.py asserts every marked figure against the findings store, on every built page. They are two questions about the same numbers and neither implies the other.

Reader-side judgement

Evidence and interpretation are separate layers. This record publishes the first: what an official source published, when, and how it relates. What any document requires, of anyone, is the second, and it stays on the reader’s side of the line.

Derived — registercheck.py over the built prose and applicabilitycheck.py over the pages that speak about documents. Each ships a vocabulary measured against this corpus, and each prints on every run the shape it does not reach, because a gate that silently covered half a clause converts silence into a receipt.

Resources

Policy. One person, on personal equipment and personal accounts. No organisation’s systems, data or credentials are involved, and no organisation stands behind the record. Every source it reads was published by its own publisher at an address this record holds and links.

No gate measures this, and saying otherwise would be a checker vouching for something it cannot see. What a gate does reach is the material that arrived in the repository, which is the firewall arm named above and the public provenance literal beside it.

Contextual mapping

The line that appears on every surface carrying a mapping reads contextual mapping — not a regulatory applicability determination. This is the whole of the policy behind it, and it is stated here once rather than in each surface’s own wording.

What a mapping is here

An association this record drew: a term indexed across several documents, an edge recording that one document’s retained text contained a form another document is published under, or a controlled identifier this record mints and binds to entries. Each carries the publisher’s own words, the address they were read at, and the day of the reading, beside the row.

What it is not

It is not a determination that any document reaches any product, system, organisation or activity, nor that any document was written for one audience rather than another. Those judgements are the kind a reader would act on, and this record does not make them. Nor does any mapping state that two documents are the same, that either satisfies, covers or stands in for the other, or that either settles anything the other leaves open: derivation between documents is published only where the documents themselves state it, with the citation.

Both clauses are here because they were removed from the surfaces that used to carry them. Until 2026-09-12 the same refusals were written in each surface’s own wording — on the concordance, on the citation graph, on every topic page, and on each mapping block of every entry page that carries one. Collecting them costs nothing while the wordings agree and saves the day they stop agreeing, which is the only day the duplication would ever have been noticed.

Where the line appears, and where it does not

On every surface that renders a mapping this record drew. It does not appear on the block of relations a publisher states about its own document: that is the publisher’s claim, carrying the publisher’s words and the act they were read from, and labelling it a contextual mapping would be this record recharacterising someone else’s statement. That block carries its own sentence saying whose act it records.

A rule rather than a count

No number of badged surfaces is published here. A count typed onto a page that reads as a standing statement is carried the moment a surface is added or removed. The rule above is checkable against the built site on any day; a number would be checkable only on the day it was written.

The line does not stand in for the evidence

It says what class of thing the association is. It says nothing about any particular association, which is why it takes no argument and reads identically everywhere. The evidence for each mapping stays where it always was: the quote, the citation and the date, on the row.

What is stated elsewhere

Who keeps this record, what is tracked, what each verification mark means, what is stored on a device and what happens when something here is wrong are on How this is kept. The corrections log is at corrections. The machinery, the schema and both feeds are on Developers.

Last updated: 18 September 2026