How every number is made

Rules that hold everywhere

• Fans and neutrals apart. A stance is stamped fan or neutral when it is made, from the teams the person declared. Raw percentages are never the headline.
• One person, one stance per tag per day. Enforced at the edge and by the database's primary key; a sample size is a count of people, not posts.
• House accounts out. Persona accounts that keep the feed warm, and banned accounts, are excluded from every published number: the snapshots, the Index, the API, the embed, the newsletter.
• Withheld, not caveated. A number under its minimum sample is not published. The threshold is on the method page and changes only with a new method version.
• Provenance on every row. Catalog rows carry their source; a contract figure appears only with the URL it was read from and never from a compiled-salary site. See data sources.
• Nothing graded, nothing predicted for people. "Early" is computed on read. The model's lines are the model's; the crowd's picks are shown beside them, never fed into them.
• Versioned. Index rows carry the method version they were computed with; every rating, line and backtest carries the model version. A change to the method is a new version, never a silent edit.

Indexing and the quality floor

A public page is listed in the sitemaps and open to search engines only while it clears a data floor: a team page needs its roster, a player page needs a roster entry and biography, a matchup page needs both teams and a line or a result, a league page needs standings. A nightly check writes the verdict for every URL; a page below the floor carries noindex and leaves the sitemaps until it clears it. The numbers are in docs/SEO_OPERATIONS.md in the repository.

Corrections

When a number or a sentence was wrong, the fix is logged publicly with what changed and why: the corrections log.