Editorial policy

Who writes these pages

Every page on aaarticle.com is drafted and reviewed by AI systems, and published by the Media Division of CAC Company, which is responsible for it.

We say that first because it is the thing a reader most needs in order to weigh what follows.

Two roles do the work, and they are separate on purpose: one drafts a page against a written specification, and a second reads the result against the same specification and can refuse it. A refused page is fixed and read again. Neither role is a person, and the division does not put a person’s name on work a person did not do — there are no bylines, no invented reviewers, and no claimed credentials anywhere on this site.

The rules themselves — what the site covers, what counts as a source, which languages ship, what a page must contain before it is allowed out — are set by the division and written down before anything is drafted against them. The rest of this page is those rules, stated the way a reader can hold us to them.

Where the facts come from

Pages are written from general reference material about well-documented subjects — kitchen equipment, places open to visitors, and history. We do not report; nothing here is first-hand, and no page claims to be.

Three limits follow from that, and we would rather state them than have you find them:

• A page is a summary, not a source. For anything that matters — an opening time, a price, a medical or legal question — check the operator or a specialist.
• Contested subjects are written to the mainstream reading, and where the reading is genuinely disputed the page says so instead of picking a side quietly.
• Dates and figures in history pages are conventional ones. Where scholarship gives a range rather than a year, the page gives the range.

Pictures

Every picture on the site is a public-domain or freely licensed file, and every one of them names, on the page that uses it, the author, the licence, and the source file it came from. We publish nothing under a licence we cannot verify. History and destination pages draw on Wikimedia Commons; the home-kitchen pages also use StockSnap, Flickr, Rawpixel and WordPress.org.

Where an uploader asked to be credited a particular way, that is the credit we print. The licence terms are the licensor’s, not ours; the common ones here are public domain, CC BY-SA, CC BY and CC0.

Language

Every page on this site is published in English, Spanish, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese, and a subject ships in all four or in none.

The four editions are not machine output of one another. Each is written to its own conventions — Spanish to a pan-Hispanic standard rather than a national one, Chinese to the mainland standard — and a name is spelled one way across the whole site in a given language, including where two sections of the site mention the same person or place. Where a person wrote their own name in a particular orthography, we keep theirs.

Advertising, and what a page loads

No page on this site carries an affiliate link or a paid placement. Buying guides recommend on the merits of the equipment, nothing is ranked for money, and no outbound link on a page was bought.

The pages do load two Google services, and we would rather name them here than leave you to find them in the markup:

• Google Analytics, on every page, to measure traffic.
• Google AdSense. The account tag is on every page, and an empty ad slot sits in the markup of every buying guide and how-to answer, because an application is pending. No advertisement is served today — the slot has no id and the block is hidden — and advertising cookies stay off in every region until that changes. When the application is approved, one ad will appear at the end of those pages, and this paragraph will say so in the present tense — except in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland. No advertisement is shown to visitors there, and approval will not change that: the script checks the region before it checks the slot.

Which equipment a guide recommends is settled before any of that, and it does not move when an ad appears beside it. What each service stores, and how to opt out, is on the privacy policy page.

Corrections

If a page is wrong, we want to know, and the correction is worth more to us than the page being right the first time.

Write to contact@aaarticle.com. Tell us which page and what is wrong with it; a source we can check makes it fast. The address reaches the Media Division of CAC Company, which publishes this site and answers for it.

What then happens is recorded with the page itself:

• The page is corrected, and its change, reason and requester fields record what changed, why, and who asked. An outside request is recorded under a stable pseudonym, never an email address — the same requester always gets the same pseudonym, and the address itself is never published. Those three fields are printed on the page, under the text, on every page that carries them, in all four languages.
• The page’s updated date moves, and that date is on the page.
• On articles, destinations and history pages, and on these accountability pages, the version you read is not overwritten: it stays at snapshot.aaarticle.com under a checksum of its own bytes, and the corrected page records the checksum of the version it replaced.

We do not silently rewrite. A page that changed says that it changed.