Sources policy

Every factual claim in a Point of Order piece traces to a source we have opened and read. This page sets out the standard we hold ourselves to, so you can tell when we have met it and when we have not.

Where we get things

Primary documents first, always. Hansard and bill texts from Parliament, gazetted acts and regulations from the Federal Gazette, ministry and agency publications, Bank Negara, the Department of Statistics, the Election Commission, the Auditor General's reports, and court judgments where public.

Established news organisations andpeer-reviewed empirical research are acceptable and cited carefully. A replicated study with published data is stronger evidence than a news report of that study, so we cite the study itself.

Think tanks, advocacy research and opinion columns we use only alongside a stronger source. They are often the best writing on a topic and frequently right. They are also produced to argue a position, so we use them to find an argument and then source that argument's facts elsewhere.

We do not use anonymous claims, forwarded messages, aggregators that do not themselves cite a primary source, or anything we cannot open and read.

Rules we hold to

• Numbers, dates, vote counts and monetary figures require a primary source.
• Anything attributed to a named person links to where they said it.
• We check figures against the primary document, not against a news report of the primary document. News reports get numbers wrong routinely.
• Where two credible sources conflict, we record both and say they conflict. We do not silently pick one.
• A finding measured in another country is evidence about that country. If we reason across to Malaysia, we say so and show the step.
• If a claim cannot be sourced, it does not go in. We do not soften it, and we do not write "reportedly".

What we do when we cannot find something

We say so, in the first person, in the piece. "We have not been able to locate a downloadable text of either Code" is a sentence you will see in our work. What you will not see is that turned into a claim about the world, because the fact that we could not find a document is not evidence that the document does not exist.

This distinction sounds pedantic. It is the single most common way an explainer publishes something false while feeling careful.

Every piece lists its sources

Not as an appendix. Our sourcing being visible is part of the product. If a piece makes a claim you want to check, the link is at the bottom of that piece.