Trust and provenance

Trust is the core Atlas experience. The product publishes information about real people and organizations, so every useful record must make the evidence visible enough for a user to inspect it before acting. Atlas should never ask you to believe a profile because it appears in Atlas. It should show what it knows, how it knows it, and where the record may still be partial, stale, or uncertain.

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What Atlas knows

Atlas records can describe public civic actors: A record can include a place, issue areas, short description, source links, source dates, public contact surface, related actors, and workspace artifacts such as briefs or coverage targets.

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How Atlas knows it

Atlas connects each claim to public evidence. A source can be a local news article, organization website, public record, nonprofit directory, coalition list, report, podcast page, campaign page, or other public material. When you inspect a record, look for:

• Source title: The document or page that mentioned the actor.
• Publication or publisher: Who published the source.
• URL: Where you can verify the source yourself.
• Date: When the source was published or when Atlas saw it.
• Source type: Journalism, organization website, directory, public record, report, podcast, or another category.
• Extraction context: The sentence, row, paragraph, or page fragment that explains why Atlas connected the source to the actor.

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What source evidence means

Source evidence means Atlas found public material that supports showing the record. It does not automatically mean the source is complete, independent, current, neutral, or correct. Use this reading model:

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Stale, partial, and uncorroborated data

Atlas should make uncertainty visible instead of smoothing it over. Stale data means the best source evidence may no longer describe the current state. A profile can still be useful as a research lead, but the user should not assume the person has the same role, the organization is active, or the contact surface still works. Partial data means Atlas knows some things but not others. A source may prove that an organization exists in Phoenix and works on wage theft, but not prove its current staff, funding, coalition partners, or service area. Uncorroborated data means the record has limited independent support. One source may be enough to show a lead, but not enough to treat the profile as a settled account of an actor’s work.

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How corrections work

Atlas supports correction pathways because public data about people can be wrong, stale, duplicated, overbroad, or missing context. Users can flag:

• Incorrect names, descriptions, locations, issue tags, or actor types.
• Broken, stale, misattributed, or low-quality sources.
• Duplicate profiles that should be merged.
• Records that should not be public.
• Missing context that changes how a record should be understood.

Flags are reviewed by maintainers or workspace operators before they change the public record. A correction should improve the user experience by making the profile more accurate, more clearly sourced, or more honest about uncertainty.

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What Atlas explicitly does not claim

Atlas does not:

• Endorse a person, organization, campaign, or issue position.
• Decide that one actor is more important than another.
• Verify every statement inside every source.
• Guarantee that a person is currently active, reachable, or in the same role.
• Publish private workspace notes as public evidence.
• Treat a team workflow as proof that a public claim is true.
• Replace local knowledge, direct verification, or editorial judgment.

The safest way to use Atlas is to treat it as a source-linked discovery layer: it helps you find leads, understand why they surfaced, and decide what needs human review next.

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Public and private evidence

Public Atlas records are built from public evidence. Workspace artifacts such as private lists, briefs, coverage targets, notes, usage proof, and renewal packets belong to the workspace unless a user deliberately publishes a public-safe record. This boundary matters. A public user should not have to trust a claim that only exists inside an enterprise workflow. A workspace user should not have to worry that private planning context will leak into the public map.

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Before acting on a record

Use this checklist before outreach, publication, funding review, or public claims:

1. Open the profile and read the source panel.
2. Check whether the strongest evidence is recent.
3. Look for more than one independent source when the use is high-stakes.
4. Confirm that the source actually supports the specific claim you plan to repeat.
5. Treat contact information, roles, and current activity as provisional unless the evidence is recent and direct.
6. File a correction if the profile is wrong, stale, duplicated, or misleading.

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