Adding a source
A government website is only added to the registry after its listing page has been opened and inspected by hand, and the real notices it shows at that moment have been matched one-for-one against what our extraction rules pull out — including following at least one document link through to confirm it's a genuine, working file on the government's own domain. A source that fails this check isn't added.
Only three tiers, on purpose
Sources are grouped into tiers for organization, not to change how strictly they're checked — every source gets the same manual verification regardless of tier.
District/local sources and broader web-discovered sources are deliberately not used yet — both are too inconsistent in format to trust without the same per-site verification every current source has had, and auto-discovered sources in particular would mean trusting something an algorithm found instead of something a person checked, which this project has avoided from the start.
Staying accurate over time
Government site markup changes without notice. When a source stops matching — because a page was redesigned, a table reordered its columns, or a listing moved — extraction for that source fails loudly rather than silently returning wrong data, and it gets reviewed by hand before it's published again.
The last check: a human editor
Source verification determines whether a site is watched at all. It's a separate, additional check from the per-posting editor review described in How It Works — every individual posting is still reviewed by an editor before it goes live, even when the source is official.