How the data is sourced
What counts as a source, what a blank means, and who is behind the judgments
The rule
No fact is written from memory. Every value is read from the provider's own pages (pricing, documentation, security, legal) on a stated date, and ships with four things: the value, the verbatim sentence it was read from, the source URL and the date. Third-party summaries, review sites and aggregators are not sources.
If a value is wrong, the excerpt makes that easy to show. A wrong figure goes through the contact page; a confirmed correction replaces the record and is published in the ledger.
Three kinds of blank
A cell can be empty for three different reasons, and they are never merged:
| Blank | Meaning | Where it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Not documented | Nobody has read a page for it yet | an absent fact |
| Not offered | The product structurally cannot have it (a cache has no vector dimensions) | not_offered in /ledger.json |
| Not stated on the vendor's page, on a date | A page was read and did not say | unstated on the provider, not_stated in the ledger |
Only the third is evidence, and it is evidence about a page, not about a product. There is a fourth record: where two pages of one vendor contradict each other on a criterion, no value is recorded at all, and source_disagreements returns both quotes with their URLs.
What is a fact and what is judgment
- Facts carry a source, an excerpt and a date and are re-checked against their pages on a schedule; a quote that no longer matches is investigated, not left.
- Editorial ("best for", "consider alternatives when") is written by a named person and carries no source because it is opinion. It is published only after that person approves it, and the page says who wrote it.
- iScore is computed from sourced facts by rules published at /iscore/. It carries an 80% interval, and a rank is called a finding only when the evidence separates a provider from the next one. A thin record is pulled toward the category middle with a wide interval, and says which pillar is thin.
- Estimates (
estimate_monthly_cost) are arithmetic on published rates and are labelled as ours beside every figure.
Freshness
Facts and price tables expire. A fact older than its window stops being published rather than being shown as current, and a per-volume price table expires sooner than a fact, because price lists move.
Our interest in the tools these docs use
These docs are built with Fumadocs, an open-source documentation framework. inetGeek also profiles Fumadocs among developer documentation platforms, and that record carries the same disclosure. Nothing about its facts is sourced differently because we use it: they come from its own site and documentation like every other record.