Editorial standards

The confidence label is always visible

MADLUL does not have one undifferentiated idea of "a story". Every published story carries a status, and that status appears on the story — not in a footnote — so a reader always knows what kind of account they are reading.

Confirmed

Corroborated by more than one independent source, or by an official record we can cite directly.

Multiple sources

More than one source carries it, but they are not fully independent of one another.

Developing

A live situation. What is known now is expected to change, and the story is updated as it does.

Source report

An accurately attributed account attributed to a named source — an official statement, a briefing, or another outlet’s reporting. We are telling you what that source said, not asserting it as established fact.

Unverified

We have it from one place and have not established it. Presented as work in progress and never as the front page’s lead.

Disputed

Credible accounts conflict. The conflict is shown rather than averaged into a single confident sentence.

What we will not do

We do not publish a story that has no confidence label. We do not promote an unverified claim to the front page as its lead. We do not resolve a contradiction by quietly choosing the more convenient version.

We also do not invent certainty in the other direction. Where something is not known, the story says so in a dedicated "what we don’t know" field, because a reader is entitled to the boundary of our knowledge and not only its contents.

How a story moves from machine to page

1. Sources are ingested on a schedule. Nothing reaches a reader at this stage — an ingested item is raw material.
2. Claim extraction records what a source actually said, and which source said it, so a claim can be traced back.
3. An automated pass classifies confidence, region and section. This pass never publishes anything.
4. A human review decides. Approval, hold or rejection is recorded against a named operator identity, with a timestamp, in an audit trail.
5. Only then does a story become visible to a reader.

A person decides, and the record says who

Automation on MADLUL is a preparation layer. It assembles, it extracts, it classifies — and then it stops. The decision to publish is made by a human operator, and that decision is written to the database as it is made.

We are precise about one thing here, because it is easy to overstate: there is a single desk identity, recorded as an operator, not a large editorial team with individual bylines. We do not present an operator decision as a named journalist’s work, and we do not create invented author accounts to make the desk look larger than it is.

Contradictions are shown, not smoothed over

When two credible accounts of the same fact conflict, the conflict is recorded. While it remains unresolved, that story cannot be presented as the front page’s confident lead — the desk has not reconciled its own evidence, so it does not get to sound certain.

This is deliberately uncomfortable. The alternative is a smoother front page built on a silent choice between two accounts, which is a worse failure than visible uncertainty.

Region, and what we exclude

MADLUL is a Middle East publication. Some world stories genuinely do not concern this region; those are marked out of scope and are not shown on the front page, the live feed or the regional surfaces. We would rather be an honest regional publication than a thin global one.

Where a story is kept but marked out of scope, that judgement is recorded with its basis, so it can be challenged rather than simply inherited.

Language is a rule, not a preference

A story belongs to the edition that matches the language it was reported in. MADLUL does not machine-translate one edition to fill the other, and it does not pad an edition with machine text.

A consequence we accept: the Arabic and English editions do not contain the same stories. Where a story exists in one language and not the other, the other edition simply does not carry it.

Corrections

When we are wrong we correct it and say so, rather than editing quietly. The corrections record is public, and every entry states what was said before, what it says now, and why it changed.