How Foundry4 reports and corrects

Sourcing

Any number that appears in an article carries a link, in the sentence that uses it, to the organisation that produced it. That means the audit report, the department's own statistics release, the statute, the annual filing, the regulator's decision or the study itself. A trade press write-up of a report is not the report, and a market forecast recycled through four websites is not a source at all, whatever the fourth one attributes it to.

The standard is applied per figure rather than per article, so a piece with eleven numbers in it carries eleven links. Each cited document is also listed at the foot of the article, with the publishing body named, so a reader who wants to check the whole basis of a piece can do it from one place instead of hunting through the prose.

When a figure cannot be verified

Plenty of the interesting questions in enterprise and government technology have no published answer. Nobody collects a reliable total for what British councils spend maintaining software nobody supports, and the vendors who might know have every reason not to say.

In that situation the article does not estimate and it does not borrow somebody else's estimate. It says what is established, explains the method by which the remainder could be worked out, and names the body that would have to publish the missing part. A described method is more useful to a reader with a spreadsheet than a confident figure, and it has the further advantage that it cannot turn out to be wrong.

The same rule governs what does not get published. If a claim cannot be traced to a named source, it is left out rather than hedged into the text with "reportedly" or "industry estimates suggest". An article that has nothing verified to say about something says nothing about it.

Bylines and desks

Articles here are published under the name of the publication, or under a named desk such as the Foundry4 Automation Desk or the Foundry4 Public Sector Desk. No piece is signed by a person, and there are no contributor pages anywhere on this site.

The reason is worth stating rather than leaving to inference. A byline is a claim about who stands behind a piece and what they know, and a made-up name attached to a made-up career is a fabrication of precisely the kind these rules exist to stop. Publishing under the masthead is the honest version: it says the publication is answerable for the piece, which is true, rather than asserting a person who is not. It also means a reader judges the work on whether its sources hold up, which is the only test that survives.

Desk names describe the subject area a piece belongs to, nothing more. They are not teams, they do not imply headcount, and they carry no credentials. Where an article covers a field with its own professional standards, such as security or clinical technology, it reports what qualified practitioners and named bodies have published rather than offering an opinion of its own.

Corrections

Corrections are made on the article itself, not quietly in the background. When a factual error is found, the text is fixed, a dated note is added at the foot of the piece saying what was wrong and what it now says, and the revision date on the article moves. The original address stays live, because a page that disappears is worse than a page that admits a mistake.

Three things are treated as errors: a figure that does not match its source, a source that does not say what the article claimed, and an attribution to the wrong organisation. A change of view is not a correction and is not presented as one. Where later evidence undermines an argument, the piece gets a dated note recording that, and the argument stays visible.

Typographical fixes and clarifications that do not change meaning are made without a note. The dividing line is whether a reader who acted on the earlier version would have been misled.

Independence and commercial content

Nothing on this site is paid for by the organisations it covers, and no company has been given sight of an article before publication or any say over one afterwards. If sponsored material ever appears, it will be labelled as such where it sits, and the covering desk will not be the one that wrote it. The current position, and how the publication is funded, is set out on the about page.

External links exist because the source is worth reading, never as part of any arrangement. Naming a supplier, a product or a department is a matter of record, not a recommendation.

Reporting an error

Errors go to editorial@foundry4.com. The most useful message names the article, quotes the sentence at issue and points at the document that contradicts it, which usually settles the question in one exchange. Every article published so far is listed on the insights index, and the other addresses this publication uses are on the contact page.