Enrichment and fact-checking
How a story is researched, what Confirmed, Unverified and Contested mean, and what the claim checks on an output do.
Enrichment turns an approved pitch into a story an editor can rely on, and the claim check tells an editor whether an output has stayed within what the story established. Both are built around one idea: show the reader where each statement comes from and how settled it is, rather than presenting everything as equally certain.
What enrichment produces
When a story is created, Nuvelics researches it beyond the articles that were in the pitch and writes the result into the story:
- A story meaning: the who, what, when, where and why.
- Original sources, which are the articles the pitch was built on, and additional sources that research found.
- Key claims, each with a status and the sources behind it.
- Key entities, the people and organizations involved, and a story timeline.
- Key quotes attributed to speakers, where the sources print them.
- Related media, and where available social posts from eyewitnesses and photos or videos from your own archive.
The original sources are frozen at the moment an editor approved the pitch. The research may add sources later but never changes the ones the editor saw. Re-enriching replaces the additional material and leaves the original sources alone.
Claim status
Every key claim carries one of three statuses:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Confirmed | The research supports it. |
| Unverified | The research could not verify it. Nuvelics is told to say "unverified" rather than guess. |
| Contested | Sources disagree. The claim lists what each source asserts. |
A status is a statement about the research, not a ruling on the world. A claim marked Confirmed by mistake is still confirmed as far as the story goes, which is why outputs are checked against the story and never described as verified.
A quote attached to a contested claim is the model's reading of what a source said. Nuvelics cannot guarantee the words appear in the source, so treat the quote as a pointer and read the source.
An editor can dismiss a key quote that was attributed to the wrong person. A dismissed quote stays dismissed after a re-enrichment, and an output that quotes its words is flagged until the words are edited out or the quote is restored.
Claim checks on an output
An output is written from the story, and a different reader then checks the result. After an output is written, a second pass reads the finished text against the story's claims and reports where each claim is used, plus any statement that nothing in the story supports. The writer is never asked to list what it used, because a writer that breaks the rules would also misreport them.
The result is shown as Claim checks, in four tabs:
| Tab | What it lists |
|---|---|
| Unconfirmed | Claims the story marks Unverified or Contested that the output uses anyway. |
| Unsupported | Statements nothing in the story's claims, timeline, meaning or summary supports. |
| Kept | Confirmed claims the output uses, and where. |
| Cut | Claims the output leaves out. Every unconfirmed one should be here. |
Open findings are the unconfirmed and unsupported ones. Each one is resolved by changing the output, or by Accept… with a note saying why it is fine. The note is required, because it is the record of why a person decided it was fine. "The checker judged this fine" and "a person decided this is fine" are kept apart.
A few things follow from how the check works:
- It checks against the story, not the world. That is why the page says Claim checks and never Verified.
- A finding never fails or rewrites an output. The output stays Ready.
- It can go out of date. If the output is edited after a check, or the story is re-enriched, the panel says the check is outdated and recommends Check again.
- Publishing waits for it. Filing an article into a content management system or publishing a post waits for a current check and for open findings to be accepted. If the check itself fails, the output is unaffected and you can still publish; the publish is recorded as "published unchecked".
- Images are not claims. A picture's relevance is a judgement the check does not make.