Editorial console

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For investigators

The state of the archive, the checks it fails, and a composer that writes records in the shape the content model expects. Public, so the archive's own quality checks can be read alongside its claims.

Integrity

What the archive currently fails

A dangling reference here means a claim pointing at nothing, or a published document with no source behind it.

Checks that run on every page load:

Evidence citing a source record that does not exist
Evidence linking to a related item that does not exist
Claims, questions and offices citing evidence that does not exist
Published evidence with no source attached
A claim asserting VERIFIED or CORROBORATED with no evidence attached
A question marked ANSWERED with no evidence attached

Citizen submissions

Review workflow

Nothing submitted by the public goes live automatically.

Actions available to a reviewer

What every review must record

Who reviewed it, and when
What the item was checked against
Why the verification state it received, rather than a higher one
Any redaction applied, and the reason
Whether the contributor gave permission to publish, and to credit

Where submissions currently land. The public form posts to Netlify Forms, which holds submissions privately with email notification, outside this repository, so that unreviewed material never sits in a public place. A reviewer reads them there, and only a reviewed record is written into the archive through the composer below.

Record composer

Write a record

Fill this in and the console emits a record in the shape data/records.js expects. Paste it into the matching array and commit. The commit is the audit trail: who changed it, what changed, and when.

Record kind ID — leave blank for a placeholder

Title, or the quoted statement for a government response

Type / channel Verification state

Incident Date on the item

Source IDs — comma separated Leave this blank and the record renders with NO SOURCE ON RECORD everywhere it appears. URL — for a source record How we obtained it / who issued it What this establishes What this does not establish Required in practice. Fill it in before publishing the record.

Beyond the prototype

What a full CMS has to add

This console covers composing and checking. A hosted editorial system for a growing national archive has to meet the requirements below.

Must have

Create and edit every entity: incident, event, person, office, order, evidence, source, claim, question, government response, submission.
Link evidence to claims and questions, and set an answer state, without touching a file by hand.
Review queue for citizen submissions with the seven reviewer actions.
Version history on every record, with a readable diff.
Audit trail: who changed it, what changed, when — retained permanently, and never editable from inside the application.
Corrections as first-class records, shown publicly on the item they correct.
Role separation: contributor, reviewer, editor. Only an editor may publish.

Must not do

Publish anything from the public form automatically.
Allow a claim to be set VERIFIED without attached evidence.
Allow an office to be linked to an order without a document.
Store contributor contact details anywhere they are visible to the public site.
Permit a silent edit to a published record — every material change is versioned and dated.
Delete a record. Withdrawn material is marked withdrawn, with a reason.

Why the audit trail lives in version control for now. A public git history gives the archive an append-only record of every change, attributable and timestamped, without a database an administrator could quietly rewrite. Any CMS that replaces it has to be at least as hard to tamper with.