Methodology

What gets indexed

Primary sources only — what the state writes, says, tables and publishes about itself. No news articles, no commentary, no leaked material.

CivicSignals currently tracks Written Parliamentary Questions, ministerial answers and Early Day Motions. New sources are added as the pipeline can sustain them.

How we work

Every record in the corpus is held to the same standards.

Verbatim quotes. Extracts are character-for-character what the source document says. No paraphrase, no condensation, no “cleaning up.” If a passage is too long to quote in full, the load-bearing sentence is extracted and the full text is one click away.

Full provenance. Every record includes the source URL, the date, the speaker or author, and a stable identifier. Any claim can be checked against the source in seconds.

Records preserved. Records are retained even if the original is later moved or removed by its publisher. Preservation is the baseline; search and analysis sit on top of it.

Restraint by design. Topic selection carries editorial judgement, but record pages remain restrained: the quote, the source, the date, the speaker and the provenance. Interpretation is kept separate from evidence.

Corrections

If CivicSignals misstates a source, the correction is made publicly.

A correction is anything where the corpus misrepresents a source document — a quote that isn’t verbatim, a wrong date, a misattributed speaker, or a link to the wrong document. Disagreement with what a minister said is not a correction.

Disagreement with the choice of topic, scan or framing is an editorial dispute, not a correction. Where useful, CivicSignals may append clarifying context or publish a note explaining the basis for a scan. The original record is not removed merely because the analysis is contested.

Email [email protected] . Response within seven days. If the correction stands, the record is republished with a visible link to the correction; the original is retained, so the public record is annotated, not erased.

Funding

CivicSignals is independent and self-funded by the creator. No advertising, no commercial sponsor, no party donation, no foundation grant.

Citation & licensing

Cite CivicSignals pages by URL and date of access.

Parliamentary material — including Written Parliamentary Questions, ministerial answers and Early Day Motions — is used under the Open Parliament Licence . Other UK public-sector material is used under the licence stated by the original publisher, including the Open Government Licence where applicable.

Each record preserves its source body, date, identifier and URL, and links back to the original publisher.

CivicSignals is independent and is not endorsed by, affiliated with, or operated by UK Parliament, HM Government, or any public body.