Where reports come from

Records are collected automatically, every ten minutes, from the sources below. What a source is decides what its report can show: an agency measurement records that an event happened; a warning announces a hazard; a news report describes what a publisher said.

Official agency record

Humanitarian agency report

Official warning

Forecast

Satellite detection

News report

  • News reports (Google News)
  • News reports (Bing News)
  • News reports (GDELT)
  • National press
  • News reports

Encyclopedia entry

Reader report

  • Reader report (reviewed)

The full list of feeds, with what each covers and how fresh it is, is on the status page; which incident types have no official live feed anywhere is on the coverage page.

What the status labels mean

Every incident page shows one status. The rules are tested in this order, and the first that applies is the one shown.

  1. Corrected — an editor published a correction to the record. The earlier version stays on the timeline, struck through, with a link to the correction.
  2. Officially recorded — an official agency or a humanitarian agency (UN, Red Cross, WHO) published its own record of the event, or an editor checked it against one. This confirms the event was recorded. It does not confirm figures quoted in news reports, such as deaths or damage.
  3. Official warning or Forecast — a warning or forecast is the only evidence. A hazard was announced; on its own that is not a report that harm occurred.
  4. Satellite detection — an automated satellite detection is the only evidence, such as a heat signature. It is not a confirmed report of a wildfire or its damage.
  5. Corroborated — the event was reported through two or more different kinds of source: news and a satellite detection, news and an official warning, news and a reviewed reader report. Or an editor marked it so. Wikipedia and editorial notes do not count as a separate kind, because they summarise the same reporting.
  6. Reported — everything else: the event is described by news reports or a single source and has not been independently confirmed.

Why a count of reports is never confirmation. One wire-service story is often republished by dozens of outlets. Twenty copies of it are one report, not twenty witnesses. The number of reports attached to an incident is shown as a count and nothing more; it never raises a status.

What software does not do. No automated system here judges whether a claim is true. The status describes what kind of evidence exists and whether an editor has reviewed it.

How duplicate reports are handled

  • One incident, one page. Further reports of the same event are attached to the existing page instead of creating a copy, and each appears on its timeline with its own link and time.
  • Earthquakes are matched by what an earthquake is — origin time within two minutes and epicentre within about 100 km — and only across different agencies. One agency reporting two quakes in the same place is two quakes, so those are never merged.
  • News reports of the same story are matched by their headline wording within a few days.
  • Templated feeds are never merged on wording. Satellite fire clusters, GDACS alerts and seismic networks use formulaic titles, so two records sharing a title are treated as two different events.
  • When a page is merged into another, its address keeps working: it redirects permanently to the surviving page.
  • Where a match is uncertain, the records are left separate. An extra duplicate page is a smaller error than two different events presented as one.

Updates and corrections

  • Source revisions — when a source republishes a record with a different figure (a revised earthquake magnitude, a changed headline, a raised severity), the old value is kept on the timeline beside the new one. Figures are never overwritten silently.
  • Editorial entries — official statements, corrections and resolutions are added by an editor, each with its source link and the name of the person who added it.
  • Corrections never delete the entry they correct. The original stays visible, marked as corrected, and links to the correction.
  • Found an error? Tell us, with a link to the source that shows it.

The four times on an incident page

  • Event time — when the incident happened, as the source reported it.
  • First received — when this site first stored a report of it.
  • Last checked — the last time a source was still carrying the record.
  • Last update — the last meaningful change on the timeline: a new report, a revised figure, a statement or a correction. Re-reading an unchanged feed does not count, and search engines are only told a page changed when one of these happened.

All times are in UTC.