How we fact-check
Most "fun facts" sites are thin, and a lot of them are quietly wrong. Ours is the opposite by design: every claim on every page is checked against real sources before the page is allowed to exist. That's not a policy we hope to follow — it's a gate built into the site's build. An unverified article physically cannot go live.
1. Prevention — how a draft is written
Each article is written from fresh research, not from memory. The companion video script is a starting point; the article goes deeper and re-checks everything. As it's written, every factual claim is logged to a claims ledger — the claim, its source (a URL or a named study and year), and how settled the science is. Where the evidence is genuinely contested, the prose says so, out loud. A hedged-true sentence always beats a confident-wrong one.
2. Detection — independent verification
Before an article can be marked ready, each logged claim is re-checked against its source — a second, adversarial pass whose only job is to try to knock the claim down. Numbers and dates are confirmed, named studies are checked to see they actually say what we claim, and anything overstated is corrected, hedged, or cut.
3. Certification — the publish gate
Every article carries a verified flag (false by default) and its claims ledger in
its frontmatter. A build-time check fails the build — and excludes the page — unless the
article is marked verified and every claim in its ledger has a source. So the only
way onto munchrd.com is through the gate.
That verification isn't hidden, either: the ledger is published on every article as the "Our sources" section, a ✓ next to settled claims and a ≈ next to the ones we've deliberately hedged. You can check our working.
Where the science is unsettled
Some questions don't have a tidy answer yet — how anaesthesia works, why you shiver after you pee, what exactly a dying brain is doing. When that's the case, we tell you it's unsettled and give you the leading ideas rather than a false certainty. Honest beats neat.