Editorial policy

Effective 2026-10-17. WorldRealDebt is an independent data-journalism project that visualises and explains government debt, household debt and macroeconomic indicators from official primary sources. This editorial policy discloses how numbers are chosen, how articles are written and verified, where their limits lie and how they are corrected.

1. Mission and independence

The mission is simple: give official statistics, which stand still between releases, a sense of time, and explain how to read them correctly. We do not speak for any party, government or institution, and we take neither the side that inflates debt to sell fear nor the side that minimises it to reassure. When one definition makes a number look large and another makes it look small, we place both side by side and explain why they differ.

2. Funding and advertising

Operating costs are covered solely by display advertising served through Google AdSense. We accept no advertorials, sponsored content, affiliate links or paid placement. Ad areas carry the permitted "Advertisements" label, are never laid out to be confused with editorial content, and never use wording that encourages clicks. Advertisers have no influence over which indicators we cover or what we conclude.

3. Content types and how each is produced

The live debt clock

Every indicator is defined by the most recent official base value, its reference date (t₀) and the published annual growth rate (g). The figure on screen is an interpolated estimate computed as value(t) = base × (1 + g)^((t − t₀) / 1y), not a measurement. The base value, reference date and source URL are always shown alongside the figure, on the sources page and in API responses. Policy shocks, seasonality and intra-month movements are not modelled, so the estimate may differ from the eventual official figure.

Data stories and comparisons

A story starts from a single question (for example, "why is household debt a more immediate risk for Korea than national debt?") and proceeds through definition check, primary-source collection, figure reconciliation, draft, editorial review and a source note. Every number in the text must be traceable to a source and a reference date; numbers that cannot be traced are not published. Comparison pages fix the sorting axis to the ratio to GDP so that different debt perimeters (D1, D2, D3; central versus general government; EDP) are never weighed on the same scale.

Calculators and glossary

Calculators show the published formula and the chosen basis (total population or taxpayers) next to the result and label the output as an estimate. Each glossary entry quotes the institution's official definition first and records country differences separately.

4. Source hierarchy

First come direct releases by the country's central bank, finance ministry and statistics office (Bank of Korea ECOS, Korea's Ministry of Economy and Finance, Statistics Korea KOSIS, U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data, Japan's Ministry of Finance, Banco de España, China's Ministry of Finance and National Bureau of Statistics, among others). Second come international institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, BIS, OECD and Eurostat, used only for cross-country comparison or where no direct series exists. Private research and press reports are never a source for a figure; where quoted for context, the original source is named too.

5. Verification and confidence labels

Each new base value is checked against the official release and, where possible, cross-checked against a second independent source such as an international database. Every indicator carries one of three labels: official (taken directly from an official release), estimate (combined from authoritative sources) or proxy (a substitute series where no direct one exists). Reference dates differ across indicators and are shown on every card rather than hidden. When indicators with different release cycles share a screen, it is made clear which rests on the older vintage.

6. Update cadence

Updates follow the publishing calendar of each source. U.S. federal debt (Debt to the Penny) is daily; Bank of Korea household credit and national GDP series are quarterly; Korea's national-debt settlement and China's Ministry of Finance settlement are annual; Japan's Ministry of Finance outstanding debt is quarterly; Spain's EDP debt is monthly. Exchange rates use the published reference rate at build time, with the date shown at the top of the page. When a release appears we update the base value, reference date and growth rate, and story figures are revisited at the next editorial review. Every page is designed to surface the data's reference date rather than the time it was rendered.

7. Automation and AI assistance

Base-value collection (such as the U.S. Treasury API), exchange-rate updates, interpolation and page generation are automated, and the code can be inspected in the public repository. AI tools may assist with drafting, translation and copy-editing. Which indicators to cover, which sources to adopt and what to conclude are decided by the editorial team, and figures, sources and reasoning are reviewed by a person before publication. No AI-generated figure or quotation is published without verification.

8. Translation policy

The source language is Korean; the English, Japanese, French, Chinese and Spanish editions are translations of it. Translations convey meaning, but debt definitions, institution names, reference dates and figures stay identical in every language. A figure that differs between languages is an error and is corrected. Language editions are linked with hreflang so that search engines do not treat them as duplicates.

9. Corrections

Errors are fixed, not hidden. Intake criteria, the procedure and the log of confirmed corrections are published on the corrections page (/corrections/). When a base value changes, the sources page and the API's baseAsOf, meta and citeAs change with it, and the before-and-after is preserved in the public commit history. Differences of interpretation are handled separately from data errors, and a confirmed factual error is noted on the article itself.

10. What we do not do

We give no investment, lending or tax advice and recommend no financial product. We publish no figure without a source. We never add debts with different definitions and call the result "total debt". We do not chase clicks with alarmist headlines. We never use reader comments as evidence for a figure.

11. Editorial responsibility and reader feedback

Data curation, methodology review, reference-date checks and citation quality are the responsibility of the WorldRealDebt Editorial Team, which is named as author and publisher of every article in the site's structured data (schema.org). Readers can report factual errors, missing context or misleading wording to [email protected] or through GitHub Issues (https://github.com/eightynine01/WorldRealDebt/issues). Reports confirmed as factual errors are recorded in the corrections log.