Standards for a neutral history

Facts

The facts on each page are taken from the documents listed in its sources box. The linking sentences between those facts, and any dates worked out from them, are written by the site and are not quoted from anyone. The research file holds seventeen cited documents, from four kinds of publisher:

• international bodies: the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations (UN News and its assistance mission in Afghanistan) and UNESCO;
• national libraries and archives: the Library of Congress and the US National Archives;
• national museums and parks: the National Army Museum in London and the National Park Service at Antietam;
• universities and research bodies: the University of Kent, the University of Houston's Digital History, the US Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute and the Project for Excellence in Journalism, published by the Pew Research Center.

Campaign groups, advocacy material, blogs and forums are not relied on for anything. One document, the Strategic Studies Institute study, is read from a copy on another website, and its sources box says so.

Numbers

A count of photographs, a date or a survey result is given only as the cited document gives it, with the document named. If two documents from one publisher disagree, both figures are shown. Casualty totals and tallies of journalists killed are left out entirely; the organisations that compile them, and their methods, are the place for those.

Disputed history

Was a photograph staged? Did television turn opinion against a war? When the sources record an argument like that, the page presents the argument as unresolved. The site has no verdict of its own to offer.

Opinions

When a page reports a view, such as what one correspondent thought of his trade, it says whose view it is. Short quotations are marked and credited; everything else is paraphrased.

The law

The page on journalists and international humanitarian law explains the rules in general terms. It is not legal advice, and it does not apply the rules to any real event. Because the ICRC's treaty database pages render their text with scripts, the check could not read them, so the treaty rules are cited through an ICRC explainer and the text of Security Council resolution 1738 instead.

How far the checking went

A script, run on 2026-10-26, asked for every candidate document once and kept its text. Of 35 addresses tried, 18 could not be used, because they refused automated requests, showed a challenge page, rendered nothing without scripts, returned no body, did not resolve or simply redirected to a page already on the list. None of those is cited. The 17 that remain all returned their text.

The search patterns, 181 in all, were written after the guides, from that saved text, and then scored against it without a further request. Every one was found. That confirms the cited pages contain the phrases the guides lean on. It does not confirm that every sentence is right, and three sources were only partly read:

• the Strategic Studies Institute study: its synopsis and summary page only, not the full report;
• the University of Kent item: the repository's abstract of the chapter, since the chapter itself was blocked;
• the Library of Congress exhibition on women war correspondents: its contents page only.

No historian, lawyer or human editor has reviewed the pages against these documents.

Stance and funding

The site takes no position on any war, past or present, and none on any government, armed force or armed group. It does not campaign. It has no tie to any news organisation, government, armed force, the ICRC, the United Nations or UNESCO, and none to Media Workers Against War or any earlier holder of this domain. It sells nothing and runs no adverts. Documents are named rather than linked for now; any links added later will be chosen for their use to readers.

AI drafting

An AI system produced the drafts, working only from the cited documents. No independent editor has gone over them, and neither has a historian or a lawyer. The pictures are SVG drawings coded for the site; none of them is a photograph, and no actual person, place or product appears.

After the fetch

The single fetch described under "How far the checking went" is the last time any page was set beside its documents, and no repeat is planned. Archives re-catalogue their holdings, exhibitions come down, and the UN, UNESCO and the ICRC update their statements and figures, so a document may now say something the pages do not. The version its publisher currently holds outranks the retelling here, above all for the law and for any count of journalists killed; consult that version before quoting or relying on a point. There is no contact route, so a mistake could stay on a page without anyone catching it. A correction made to a page in future would be dated there.