civic-atlas

Verification guide

Every entry starts as a draft: compiled from official pages, but not yet checked by a person. Verifying entries is the most valuable thing a volunteer can do, and it makes a good research project for students. It needs care and patience, not programming.

What “verified” means

You personally opened every source page and confirmed that every fact in the entry matches it: each phone number digit by digit, each link, each fee, each hour and each rule. Then you recorded your GitHub handle and the date.

Steps

1. Pick a draft. uv run civic-atlas validate lists counts; any file with status: draft is a candidate. Check open issues and pull requests so you don’t duplicate someone else’s work.
2. Open each source_urls page in your normal web browser.
3. Check every channel. Do the phone numbers match exactly? Does each link open the right page? Are hours current?
4. Check the details: fees, eligibility, deadlines, what to bring.
5. Read the steps and compare them with the real website or form. Look, but don’t submit anything. If a step is wrong or unclear, rewrite it in your own words.
6. Check the notes. Are any discrepancies resolved? Update or remove those notes.

7. Update provenance:

   provenance:
     source_urls: [...]          # add any better official page you found
     last_checked: 2026-11-15
     status: verified
     verified_by: your-github-handle
     verified_on: 2026-11-15
   

8. Validate and open a pull request, using the PR checklist. In the description, say what you checked and anything you changed.

If something is wrong

Fix it if you can confirm the right answer from an official page. If you can’t, set status: needs-review, explain in provenance.notes, and open an issue.

Don’t

• Don’t call or email a department just to verify (unless you’re actually using the service), and never submit test requests.
• Don’t mark an entry verified because it “looks right”. Every fact must be checked.
• Don’t use unofficial sites (news, blogs, AI answers) as sources. They can point you to the official page, but the official page is what gets cited.

Re-verifying

Services change. civic-atlas validate warns about entries not checked in 180 days, and the weekly link checker lists pages it couldn’t reach. Re-verifying an old entry is just as useful as verifying a new one.

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