Official publishers first
Our first sources are public institutions' own publications: the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's culture portal and museum pages, provincial culture and tourism directorates, the General Directorate of Nature Conservation and National Parks, the National Palaces Administration, the Ministry of Interior's register of administrative units and the Turkish State Meteorological Service.
When an institution publishes a page about its own site, such as a municipality describing its museum or a university describing its collection, that page is treated as a primary source for that site.
Secondary sources
Wikipedia is used as a secondary source, labelled as such and credited under its licence. It may support a description, but it is never used for fees, opening hours or visiting status.
Blogs, travel sites, forums and tour operators are not used as sources, however well known they are.
A trusted publisher is not a source for everything
An institution is a primary source for its own register and its own sites. When it writes about something else, we treat that statement as secondary and keep the distinction on record.
When two sources disagree, the disagreement is recorded rather than silently resolved, and an unresolved conflict about a fact such as a fee keeps that fact off the page.
Claims made by a source
When a source makes a claim about itself, such as being the first or the largest of its kind, we attribute it to the institution rather than stating it as a fact of our own.
We avoid statements that expire quietly, such as "newly opened" or "open today"; instead we show the date on which a fact was checked.
How we collect
We read sources politely: robots rules are followed, requests to each site are spaced out, and a site that has closed off access, including through bot protection, is not worked around. We record the block and look for another official source.
We keep the text we extracted from a page and a fingerprint of it, not a copy of the page itself, so a change in a source can be detected without republishing it.
Images and photographs
Illustrations on the site are commissioned and labelled as drawings. Photographs are not copied or embedded from other sites; where we have found a suitably licensed photograph, we link to its page.
A link to a photograph is only added when the file can be tied to the place. Logos, locator maps and diagrams are not treated as photographs.