EDITORIAL STANDARD

Editorial Policy

How Global SOF Index sources, labels, and corrects the information it publishes.

Last reviewed:

Source priority

Information is prioritized by source reliability, in roughly this order:

  1. Official government, military, or agency publications.
  2. Reputable published references, official museums, and archival records.
  3. Established news reporting and specialist open-source publications.
  4. Widely repeated public reporting — treated with caution and labeled accordingly.

Lower-confidence sources are labeled, not hidden, so readers can judge them for themselves.

Evidence-confidence labels

Every substantive claim carries a confidence label:

Verified
Supported by official or authoritative public sources.
Publicly documented
Documented in reputable public references.
Commonly reported
Repeated across credible public sources but not officially confirmed.
Historical / period-specific
Accurate to a specific era, not necessarily current.
Research pending
Not yet verified; shown as pending rather than assumed.

Corrections and update process

Errors are corrected as they are identified or reported. Policy pages carry a "last reviewed" date, and unit profiles are revised as public sources are reviewed. To report an issue, use the corrections process.

Editorial prohibitions

The archive does not invent sources, licenses, credits, equipment, uniforms, personnel, or operational claims. Where public information is missing, it is marked unknown or research pending rather than fabricated.

Representative media is never presented as confirmed unit media, and unrelated imagery is not reused to represent a different unit.