Editorial policy

First obligation

The first objective of every page is to give the reader the best available practical answer to a maritime surveying question. Search visibility and commercial interest come after that, and never in place of it. An article that would rank well but mislead a surveyor on deck does not get published.

Use of AI

Research and drafting on SurveyEra are AI-assisted. That is stated openly rather than hidden. The arrangement is bounded by one rule:

An automated system may produce content. It may never establish maritime truth.

For ordinary explanatory material, automated drafting is acceptable. For anything regulatory, contractual, safety-related, or concerning surveying methodology, cargo contamination or recognised standards, the automated system's job is to find, cite and explain an authoritative source — not to assert a requirement from its own knowledge. Interpretation it is unsure of is flagged on the page and escalated to a human reviewer.

Standing rules

1. Never invent a maritime regulation.
2. Never invent a clause, regulation or paragraph number.
3. Never attribute a requirement to IMO, SOLAS, MARPOL, the IMSBC Code, GAFTA, FOSFA, ISO, IACS, BIMCO, a P&I club, a classification society or a national authority without a verified source for that specific requirement.
4. Prefer primary sources over commentary about them.
5. State clearly whether something is mandatory, recommended, contractual, or common industry practice. These are not interchangeable.
6. Never present one company's procedure as international regulation.
7. Never reproduce substantial passages from another publication.
8. Publish no factual claim of consequence without a citation.
9. Keep factual reporting visibly separate from interpretation.
10. Flag uncertainty for human review rather than resolving it by assertion.

Publication process

Every article moves through the same sequence: topic selection against a written scoring model, source research, drafting, automated editorial and schema checks, a proposed change request with its sources and open questions listed, human review of the draft against those sources, and only then publication. The human review and merge step is the act of publication. It cannot be automated away, and no automated process has permission to perform it.

Review status on the page

Each article states its review status at the foot. Technical review: [name] means a named practising surveyor has read the article against its sources and accepts it. Its absence means the piece has had editorial review but not that technical sign-off. Where particular statements remain unresolved, they are listed on the page in a "pending technical review" notice rather than quietly published as settled.

Product references

MarineSurvey.Online is produced by the same company as SurveyEra. An article may carry at most one contextual reference to it, and only where a specific platform module corresponds to the task the article describes. Articles are never commissioned, framed or angled to create an opportunity for that link.

Updates and corrections

Articles are revised as regulation and practice change; the update date is shown on the page. Material corrections are made openly rather than by silent edit. To report one, see corrections.