Sources and evidence
FoodHQ currently cites 58 registered sources. Each is assessed on two separate questions that are easy to confuse.
Quality and rights are different questions
Quality is how much weight a source deserves — a comprehensive peer-reviewed review carries more than a single product study, which carries more than an unassessed page.
Rights are what FoodHQ is permitted to do with it. Some excellent sources may be cited and pointed at but not extracted from, because their licence does not permit it.
These are recorded independently, so an authoritative source can be reference-only and a permissively licensed one can be poor. A source being important is never treated as permission to use it, and a source being open is never treated as a reason to trust it.
Originating and corroborating
A statement needs an originating citation: the passage that actually establishes it. Further sources may corroborate, but corroboration alone cannot carry a statement — several sources agreeing that something is plausible is not the same as one source establishing it.
Exact locations, always
Every citation records where in the source the support was found, precisely enough for someone else to check it. A whole article is not a citation. Where a location could not be confirmed, the statement stays unpublished rather than being cited approximately.
What is not evidence
- Search-result snippets, forums, comment threads and content farms.
- Recipe sites and blog posts, however well informed.
- AI-generated text, including anything this system produced itself.
- A source that is topically relevant but does not actually state the thing being claimed.
That last one accounts for most refusals. A paper about frying does not automatically support every statement about frying, and matching subject matter is not the same as supporting a specific claim.
Ageing and withdrawal
Some kinds of statement expire and stop being published until re-checked. Statements found to be wrong are withdrawn rather than deleted: the withdrawal is recorded against the original so the change is visible instead of silent.