# Editorial Policy: How These Pages Get Made > Source: https://breathecheck.com/editorial-policy/ > How a BreatheCheck page is produced and reviewed, what gets attributed, what we refuse to publish, and how errors are corrected in public. # Editorial policy Readings collected automatically every hour; text written and checked by BreatheCheck Editorial . How this page is made → This page describes how the site is actually produced. It exists because “trust us” is not a method, and because a reader who finds a number here that disagrees with their own instrument deserves to know how ours was made before deciding which to believe. ## Two different things are published here, and they are made differently The readings are collected by machine, hourly, and published without anyone looking at them. A scheduled job pulls the regulatory observation from EPA AirNow, the median of nearby outdoor PurpleAir sensors corrected with the published US EPA formula for PA-II units, and modelled pollutant and UV values from Open-Meteo. Nothing in that path is reviewed before it reaches the page, because a number that waits for review is a number that is no longer current. What protects it instead is what it refuses to do: a feed that fails renders “we don’t know right now” and the last good reading with its timestamp, never a stale number dressed as live. A page whose data has not refreshed in three hours stops calling itself live. The prose is written against a brief and reviewed before it ships. Drafts are produced and checked by an automated editorial pipeline, not by an unreviewed generator. The review stage exists to do one job: verify every concrete claim against a source and delete what cannot be verified. It regularly rewrites drafts and it deletes claims. A recent pass caught a tree-canopy figure that was current in 2008 and stale by 2023, a lake-effect mechanism attributed to the wrong shore of Lake Michigan, and a comparison that was false for one city in the list. Those are the errors this stage is for. We do not claim a human reads every sentence before it publishes. Saying otherwise would be the easy thing to write and would not be true. ## What gets attributed, and how Every threshold on this site is either an agency classification or a reported behaviour, and the two are labelled differently every time. An agency number says whose it is: “EPA classifies 101–150 as Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups” is cited as an EPA classification, and it is never rewritten into “AQI 120 is dangerous for you.” A reported number says who reported it: a runner’s own cutoff from their own log, a parent’s, the figures parents and staff gave for their daycare in one thread. Those are useful precisely because they are what people actually do, and they are worthless if presented as policy. When a page shows both, it says which is which. If a number here carries no source, that is a defect, not a style choice. Report it. ## What we will not publish - Medical advice. We describe what a number means and what an agency says about it. Whether it is safe for you specifically is a question for someone who knows your history. - A tested-product claim we have not earned. We have not run a purifier through a chamber test. Where the site discusses equipment it says where the figures come from and does not imply we measured them. - An invented number. No estimated statistic, no backfilled history, no figure whose source we cannot name. - A stale reading presented as current. This is the one lie the site could tell without anyone noticing, so it is the one guarded hardest. - Coverage we do not have, described as coverage. Metros we measure but do not publish are named as measured and unpublished, with their live reading and no link. ## Errors, and what happens to them Every correction gets a dated entry on the public corrections log , permanently, and it is never edited away quietly. A page that has been corrected carries a dated link back to that entry, so a reader sees the history rather than a clean surface pretending nothing changed. That link is generated from the log itself, so a correction cannot be recorded without the page showing it. The fastest way to get something fixed is to tell us what you saw — which page, and what your own reading said. Leaving an email address is optional; reporting a wrong number should not require identifying yourself. ## Money Some pages link to products and some of those links pay a commission. The disclosure sits inline, above the recommendation, at the point where it matters, and the full policy is on how this is funded . No commission has ever changed a recommendation on this site, and if one ever does, that is a correction-log entry. Trust Get an alert when your city turns One email when it crosses your threshold. Nothing else.