Editorial standards

How Sail Commons decides what to publish and the checks every article and edition passes.

What we publish

Articles take one piece of sailing news and say what happened in plain language, and why it matters to a learner, an instructor, a parent or someone coming back to the sport. Editions gather the articles into a digest. Boat guides explain a class of boat to a beginner.

Sources

Every article links to its named sources, and the original source comes first. When we rely on another outlet's reporting, we name it in the text. A claim by a company, a club or a federation is their claim, and we say so. If we could not confirm something, we say we have not confirmed it, or we do not run it.

In our own words

We summarize and link. We do not copy. A quotation is short, at most 25 words, in quotation marks and attributed. A check scans each page against its sources and holds anything that repeats a run of ten or more words from them.

The checks every page passes

Before an article or an edition is published, it is checked mechanically (length, working source links, quotation limits and the copying scan), checked against its sources, and reviewed against these standards. It is also read from the point of view of the people it is written for, and checked for voice. Software helps run these checks. A human editor decides what publishes, and unchecked machine output does not go live. Any edit after review means the checks run again.

Interests we disclose

Sail Commons is a personal project of Christopher Ross, who also runs thisismyurl.com and other sites. It is not client work. If advertising or sponsorship is ever added, it will be labelled and will not decide what we cover.

Corrections

We fix errors openly. See corrections.