Editorial charter — free inquiry, visible dissent and accountable linking

Promise to readers

We provide access to original sources and relevant competing ideas because being able to inspect an argument matters even when one rejects it. A hyperlink is a path to evidence, not automatically an endorsement. We will disclose our reasoning and corrections and avoid treating lawful curiosity as proof of intent.

Publishing and contribution rules

1. Publish arguments in the author's own words; mark opinion, interpretation, historical account, provisional hypothesis and verified claim separately.
2. Invite voluntary public submissions, rebuttals and corrections from independent individuals and institutions, including less familiar voices. Avoid demanding demographic or political identity as a condition of contribution.
3. Represent disagreement fairly, with links to original documents and clear descriptions of why sources differ.
4. Do not create artificial “two equal sides” framing when evidence strongly favors one conclusion; readers can still follow credible minority criticism.
5. Use ordinary contextual external links for trustworthy editorial citations, and appropriately qualify sponsored or untrusted user-contributed links. Never barter links for ranking benefits. [S07][S08]
6. Give content a stable identifier, version date, language, author/organization, evidence-status tag, supporting sources and a correction history.
7. Preserve an evidence trail when correcting factual errors; do not rewrite a dissenting historical record invisibly.
8. Make criteria for inclusion, ordering, editorial rejection and contestation public. Avoid state or corporate ideology as the sole reference frame.
9. Let contributors choose terms for indexing, retrieval, research reuse and model training where technically and legally meaningful. Public posting is not a promise of incorporation into proprietary model weights.
10. Provide alternate discovery modes and exportable catalogs so users can follow knowledge across independent sites without relying on a single search service.

Visible labels

• Primary source: direct record, original publication or standard.
• Opinion / viewpoint: author's argument, not certified as fact.
• Empirical support: sourced research with methods and limitations.
• Counterargument: informed criticism of a claim.
• Unverified / disputed: insufficient or conflicting evidence.
• Historical reference: valuable context, may be superseded.
• Relationship: partner, citation, commentary or neutral reference; sponsorship marked separately.

Status: Proposed editorial policy for CognitiveLiberties.com; not existing site policy or law. Based on UDHR Art. 19 [S01], UNESCO AI ethics [S02], Google published linking rules [S07][S08].