Editorial policy
How we work, and what we will not do
Agitology publishes speculative material about a contested subject. That makes the rules around sourcing, labelling and correction more important here than they would be at a publication reporting settled facts.
The four content types are never blurred
Every item on this site is exactly one of these, and is labelled as such in its metadata, its URL and its structured data:
- News — what happened. Aggregated from a source, with the source named.
- Research — what was discovered. A paper, with its limitations printed alongside its findings.
- Analysis — what it means. Original work by the Agitology desk, carrying our own position.
- Perspectives — what someone else thinks. Published under the contributor’s name, not ours.
On a news page, third-party reporting and Agitology’s read of it appear under separate headings. We do not present aggregated reporting as original journalism.
Sourcing
- Every factual claim is traceable to a named source, listed on the page.
- Where a claim rests on a single source, we say so.
- Where we could not verify something, we say that instead of omitting it.
- Absence of evidence is reported as evidence when it is informative — an unpublished field reliability figure is a fact about the field.
Corrections
Corrections are appended to the piece, dated, and describe what was wrong rather than silently replacing the text. Index score revisions are published with their reason, including revisions downward. Nothing is quietly deleted; if a piece is withdrawn, the URL explains why.
AI-assisted content
It would be absurd for a publication about machine intelligence to be evasive about this. Our position:
- AI tooling is used for research assistance, drafting support and summarisation.
- Every published piece is reviewed and edited by a person who is accountable for it.
- Nothing is auto-published. Aggregated items pass through human review before appearing.
- We do not publish machine-generated text under a fabricated human byline.
Conflicts of interest
Contributors disclose financial and professional interests in the organisations they write about, and the disclosure appears on the piece. Where an Index dimension bears on a contributor’s employer or holdings, that is stated on the page rather than in a policy nobody reads.
Sponsorship and commercial content
- Sponsored material is labelled as sponsored, in the same position and typeface as the byline.
- Sponsors have no input into the Index, its methodology, or any editorial piece.
- No sponsor may purchase coverage of a development, a paper or an organisation.
- Newsletter sponsorship appears as a marked block, never inside the editorial body.
- Affiliate links, where used, are disclosed on the page carrying them.
Independence
Agitology takes no position on which organisation should build these systems. The Index scores capability, not companies, and no laboratory receives advance sight of a score, an embargo, or a right of reply beyond what any reader has.
Contributed pieces
Perspectives are edited for clarity and length, never for position. We commission arguments we disagree with deliberately. Where a piece contradicts the Index, we print the disagreement rather than reconciling it — and if it changes our mind, the score moves and the revision names the piece.
This preview build
Everything currently published on this site is illustrative sample content created to demonstrate the product. The named contributors are fictional, the articles and papers are invented, and the scores are not measurements. Source links on sample items are disabled so that nothing here can be mistaken for sourced reporting.
Contact
Corrections, disputes and pitches: get in touch. A claim that a specific score is wrong, with the evidence that would settle it, gets read first.