EDITORIAL POLICY
How we check articles
What we base our writing on, and what we do not write.
We go to primary sources
For roads, we check the road administrators (national highway offices of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, Ehime Prefecture, municipalities and expressway companies). For facilities, we check the official pages of the facility or the local government. We do not use the output of summary services; we download the pages and PDFs and read the original text. When we quote, we copy spaces and punctuation exactly.
We keep three kinds of information apart
| Kind | Example of how we write it |
|---|---|
| Official guidance | The official site says it is about ○ minutes by car from the airport |
| Published data | In △△ (name of the data) for year ○, there were ○ cases on this section |
| What we confirmed by driving | When we drove it in month ○ of year ○, this junction… |
Articles about routes we have not driven yet show a notice that they are based on documents and maps. After driving, we add the wording of signs and how the car park entrances look.
What we do not write
- Causes without evidence. We write "there are many accidents here because of ○○" only when police or road administrator documents say so.
- Labels such as "dangerous" or "easy to miss" that we have not confirmed in documents. We introduce places where official sources say "you cannot…" or "please take care", together with the original wording.
- Forecasts or predictions.
When sources give different numbers
Sometimes two official pages give different numbers of spaces for the same car park. In that case we do not choose one; we show both numbers and which page says which.
We show the date we checked
Roads change with construction and new openings. Each article shows the date we checked the sources, and articles we have driven also show the date of the drive. Articles last checked more than six months ago show a notice saying so.
Someone other than the writer checks the article
Before an article is published, someone other than the writer compares the quotes, numbers, source URLs and page titles, the latitude and longitude of the points, and any statements not found in the sources with the original documents. Differences found at this stage are fixed before publication.
Automatic checks
Before publishing, a script checks that required items are present, that points are numbered from 1 without gaps, that latitudes and longitudes are within Ehime, and that no guessing phrases are mixed in. Passing the script does not guarantee the content is correct, so the final check is always against the original documents. The English version is also checked by a script that compares it with the Japanese version: the points, car parks, sources and numbers must match.