Methodology

Each article is planned around one question a resident or visitor actually asks, such as what county a town is in, where to get sandbags, or how to appeal a property assessment. Two pages never answer the same question; when topics overlap they are merged into one page and the old address redirects to it.

Before a topic is written at all, we must find at least three official or primary sources (city, county, state or federal agencies, special districts, school districts) that hold enough local detail to support a full article. A topic that cannot clear that bar is merged into a broader page, set aside until the source appears, or dropped. News reporting can add context but never counts toward the three, and is never the only source for a fact.

Research starts from official and primary sources (see the sources page). Fees, hours, addresses, phone numbers and the names of officeholders always come from the agency's own current page. When two official sources disagree, we use the agency's own current page and record the conflict. Facts that could only come from memory, inference or an unreadable document are left out.

We look up the specific pages we cite, one at a time, the way a person checking a fact would. We do not crawl websites, follow links across a site or download whole sections. Our checker reads ordinary web pages, PDFs and spreadsheets (citing the page, sheet or cell a fact comes from).

We stop whenever a site asks us to prove we are human, requires a login, shows a bot challenge, or refuses the request, and we do not try another way around it. Some government sites ask automated programs not to visit at all; for those we still read only the single page we cite, identify ourselves as DigitalTownsFactCheck with a link to this page and our contact address, make no more than one request every ten seconds and no more than 200 a day, and reuse our copy for a week instead of asking again.

Articles are drafted with AI assistance from that research, in plain language and with dates on anything that changes. Every section opens with a one-sentence answer, numbers and fees go in tables, and each fact sits next to a link to the source that states it. Articles name real public places and institutions and avoid generic travel-brochure language. They do not name private individuals, publish private home addresses, cover crime, or make health or medical claims.

After an article is written, a separate checker that did not write it goes back to every cited source and checks every statement: the short answer, every paragraph, every table cell and every answer in the questions list. Anything the source does not state is corrected to match the source, moved to another official source that does state it, or removed, and every change is recorded. If removals leave an article too thin, it is not published.

Nothing is published until an automated gate passes. An article must have:

at least 1,000 words of article text; at least 10 facts, each tied to a cited source and found word for word in that source's text (on the cited page of a PDF or cell of a spreadsheet); at least 5 cited sources, with official and primary sources preferred and scored; a short answer, question headings and a list of common questions; and structured data for search engines (Article, FAQ and breadcrumb).

The gate also rejects any paragraph that would read the same with another town's name swapped in, compares every new article with every published article for every town and rejects copying (no shared sentence of twelve words or more), checks every link, and blocks a list of filler phrases.

Every source request is logged with its time, address and result, and which article and fact it was for. Whenever a fact is verified, we keep a copy of the source text exactly as it read at that moment, with a fingerprint (a SHA-256 hash) that proves it has not been altered. These records are kept for at least two years, so we can show what a source said when we cited it.

Pages are published in small batches. Each new page is linked from its section, added to the sitemap with its date, confirmed live, and announced to search engines through IndexNow. Pages are also added to the Digital Towns town guide so its answers draw on the same checked text.

Every article shows its last updated date. Time-sensitive pages are re-checked on a schedule: officials after elections and at least quarterly, budgets and tax rates after each year's adoption, hurricane evacuation and shelter pages before each hurricane season, census figures after each new release, fishing rules when the state changes them, events before each year's date, and dated notices when they end. History and nature pages are reviewed at least every two years. Every refresh goes through the same fact-check and gate. Corrections from readers go to support@digitaltowns.app and are applied as they are verified.