Methodology & Sources
Modern Politics is a solo-maintained, AI-assisted project. This page describes the process that produces the site, states how much of the site that process has covered so far, and lists what it does not do. The figures below were counted from the project’s own files on the date given; those files are not yet published for you to recount them yourself, which is noted among the limitations.
The site has two kinds of content, and they are held to different standards today. The narrative — the long-form story and the statistics pages — is written from named sources. The encyclopedia — the entity and timeline pages that make up the bulk of the site — is not yet systematically cited. Those are stated separately below rather than averaged into a claim that would be true of neither.
Who Makes This
One person: Germán Greiner. See Contributors. There is no editorial board, no fact-checking desk, and no legal review. Drafting and review are performed with AI assistance, following a fixed set of written instructions maintained alongside the content.
How a Page Gets Made
- Discovery — Candidate topics come from coverage analysis against the existing knowledge base — what the site already covers, and where it is thin — combined with web search for recent events. There is no archival crawl, no library-database subscription, and no FOIA pipeline.
- Drafting — A page is drafted by an AI agent working from web sources, following the project’s editorial standards: neutral tone, no political labeling, no editorial commentary, and explicit date precision (a year-only date is published as a year, not as January 1st).
- Review — The draft goes through the automated review described in the next section. Anything the review flags is either fixed or answered in writing, and the outcome is recorded for that page.
- Publication — Content is kept under version control, so every change to every page is recorded in a page history. Notable updates are summarized on the Blog / Updates page.
What the Automated Review Checks
Each page under review is read in parallel by five specialized checkers:
- Relevance — does this page belong on the site, and is it the right kind of page?
- Bias — does the text favor a political side?
- Factual accuracy — are dates, numbers, names, and causal claims plausible and precise?
- Tone — is there editorializing, exaggeration, or advocacy?
- Labeling — does the text apply political labels rather than describing actions?
What the review does not do: the checkers read only the project’s own files. They have no web access and cannot fetch a cited source. A “factual accuracy” pass flags claims that appear wrong or unsupported against the reviewing model’s own knowledge — it does not verify the page against the documents the page cites, because for most pages there are no cited documents to verify against. Review is a consistency and plausibility check, not source verification.
What the Review Badge Means
Entity pages, timeline events, and story sections carry a badge reporting one thing only: how far that page has got through the automated review described above. There are four states.
| Badge | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Reviewed | The page completed the automated review with nothing left unresolved, and has not been edited since. The tooltip gives the date of that review. |
| Findings open | The page was reviewed and at least one issue raised is still unresolved. |
| Needs re-review | The page was reviewed, but its text has changed since. The recorded result describes wording that is no longer there, so it is no longer reported as reviewed. |
| Not yet reviewed | The page has not been through the review process. This is a statement about coverage, not a defect in the page. |
Needs re-review exists because a review result is only true of the exact text that was reviewed. That wording is recorded alongside the outcome, and the page is compared against it every time the site is rebuilt. A page whose text has changed since drops back to Needs re-review automatically. It is not a claim that anything is wrong with the page — only that the earlier review no longer covers it.
The badge is not a claim that the page’s assertions have been checked against a source. Because the checkers cannot fetch a cited source, no badge on this site can carry that meaning today. The word “verified” is deliberately reserved for a future state gated on citation coverage.
Review coverage, counted from the project’s own files when this page was built on 8 September 2026:
| Section | Reviewed clean | Needs re-review | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Story subsections | 1 | 86 | 87 |
| Encyclopedia entries (all sections) | 74 | 213 | 765 |
The remaining sections — media, places, organizations, platforms, narratives, symbols/memes, technology, ideas, and subcultures — have not been through a review pass yet, and most timeline events have not either. Their pages show as Not yet reviewed.
How We Choose Words
Most disagreement about this subject is not about what happened but about what to call what happened, so the project constrains its vocabulary on purpose. The goal is narrow: you should be able to tell what occurred without being told, by word choice alone, how to feel about it.
There are two ways to fail at that, and this site tries to avoid both.
Smuggled verdicts. “Cracked down on,” “power grab,” “witch hunt,” “extremist” — words whose meaning is the speaker’s judgment. These are avoided and replaced with the action or the documented fact.
Euphemism. Refusing the word a field actually uses is also an editorial position. If a page about undisclosed political spending never contains the phrase “dark money,” it is less precise than the sources it draws on, harder to find, and harder to check against them. So terms with a specific, widely used meaning — dark money, election denial, astroturfing, gerrymandering — are used here, either attributed (“spending commonly described as dark money”) or defined in place. When a page describes something in its own words instead, the common term still appears once, so the page stays searchable.
The one category the site holds back from is placing people on a left–right axis in its own voice. Not because those words are unfair, but because “conservative commentator” tells you less than naming what the person actually covers. Where a person or group describes itself that way, or where the word is part of a name — the Libertarian Party, the Congressional Progressive Caucus — the page says so, because that is a fact about them rather than a label we assigned.
A caution on what this is worth: careful wording is a property of the writing, not evidence that the writing is right. Only a source can establish the second, and citation coverage here is incomplete — see below. The full policy, with worked examples, is maintained as the project’s neutrality and terminology guide.
Sourcing, by Section
All citations on the site use one shared citation format, applied the same way everywhere. Where a page carries sources, they render as a numbered list at the bottom of the page; the story compiles its subsection sources into one bibliography.
Coverage as of 8 September 2026:
| Section | Pages with citations | Total |
|---|---|---|
| Story subsections | 86 | 87 |
| Statistics datasets | 13 | 13 |
| Encyclopedia entries | 514 | 765 |
The story and the statistics pages are sourced. The encyclopedia is not. That gap is the largest open issue on the site, and it is visible to anyone who opens a page.
Where This Is Going
Every kind of page on the site can now carry sources. Doing so is optional, and sources are being added one section at a time rather than required everywhere at once. Until a section has been worked through, its pages should be read as an organized summary of publicly reported material, not as a cited reference work. Most entity pages link to a corresponding Wikipedia article, which is a starting point for a reader who wants to go further — not a substitute for a citation.
Known Limitations
- Citation coverage. 514 of 765 encyclopedia pages carry citations. The work of adding the rest is in progress and incomplete.
- Review coverage. 75 of 852 reviewable pages have passed review and are unchanged since. A further 299 passed review but have been edited since and are awaiting a fresh pass; they show as Needs re-review. The badge tells you which is which.
- Review depth. No automated or human process verifies page claims against external sources. Nothing on this site has been fact-checked in the sense a newsroom means it.
- Link rot. Citations record the date a URL was last checked. There is no automated revalidation and no private archive of captured pages. Links will rot and no process currently catches it.
- Recency bias. The timeline holds 99 events: 4 from the 1990s, 11 from the 2000s, 41 from the 2010s, and 43 from the 2020s. Recent years are far better covered than early ones. This reflects what is easy to find and to source, not the relative importance of those periods.
- Single perspective. One maintainer and one family of AI models draft and review the material. Systematic blind spots are likely and there is no second reader positioned to catch them.
- The project’s files are not public yet. The content, the review instructions, and the recorded review results are not yet published. That means the figures on this page cannot be independently recounted, and the site’s writing — though openly licensed — cannot yet be copied wholesale and built on. Publishing them is an open item, not a completed one.
- No promised response time. Corrections are welcome and are read, but this is not staffed work, and nothing here commits to answering by a given date.
Licensing and Derived Material
Two questions come up about where this material comes from and what you may do with it. Here are the answers to both.
The writing
Most entity pages carry a link to a corresponding Wikipedia article, and Wikipedia’s prose is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 — a copyleft license with attribution and share-alike obligations. Facts themselves are not copyrightable, and independent synthesis of sourced facts carries no obligation; close paraphrase of another writer’s expression does.
Our position is that entries here are the former: they are written from the underlying sources, organized around this project’s own framing of platforms, movements, and events, and are not restatements of any single article’s structure or wording.
We do not ask you to take that on trust. The site’s own writing is published under CC BY-SA 4.0 — the same license Wikipedia uses. If a passage is more derivative than we judge it to be, the license the material is already under is the one that would apply anyway. Adopting it costs this project nothing, since it wants to be cited and reused, and it removes the question rather than arguing it.
The images
Photographs and logos are not covered by that license. Each is hosted elsewhere, most often Wikimedia Commons, and retains the license its own creator chose. For every image we record the author, the source, the license, and a link to the source page, and we display that credit beneath the image on the page that uses it — CC BY and CC BY-SA both require attribution at the point of use, not merely somewhere behind the scenes. An automated check blocks publication if an image requiring credit is missing any of those details.
When reusing an image, follow the license shown for that image.
The software
The code that builds the site is separate and is released under the MIT License.
Data Ethics
We do not scrape private data or bypass access controls. The datasets behind the statistics pages are public or openly licensed, and each one names its sources on the page. Before a dataset is used, the terms of service of its source are checked and recorded. Where a page would need to identify a private individual to make its point, we prefer to leave the detail out.
Corrections and Contributions
Every page has a feedback button. It files an issue in the project’s issue tracker recording the page URL, the category you pick, and what you wrote — nothing else, and no identifying information unless you put it in the description yourself. Corrections, missing sources, and broken links are all worth reporting, and the more specific the better: a page URL and the sentence at issue is enough. Because this is one person’s project, there is no promised turnaround; reports are read and worked through as time allows.
If you want to contribute directly rather than report, see Suggest an Edit.