Updated 1 September 2026. This policy applies to pages, announcements, news summaries and posts published under an Elder Scrolls Forum editorial desk label.
Sourcing hierarchy
- Official material. Released games and in-game texts, official Bethesda or ZeniMax announcements, patch notes and verified official channels. These sources can support a plain statement of fact.
- Dated, attributable statements. A named developer, executive or journalist speaking on the record, with a date and a link. We report what the source said at that time because plans can change.
- Labelled reporting and inference. Credible reporting, datamining, community analysis and interpretation are attributed and kept separate from confirmation.
- Rumour. Anonymous claims and leaks are labelled as unverified. Repetition does not turn a rumour into evidence.
Headlines and summaries must not promote a lower-tier claim into a higher one. When sources conflict, the stronger and more recent source controls the wording.
Model-assisted editorial work
Some site-owned posts use model-assisted research and drafting. Before publication, the editorial pipeline checks duplicate coverage, named sourcing, factual consistency and house style. It also requires a separate model to review factual claims. These controls reduce errors; they do not make a post human-authored or guarantee that every claim is correct.
Names such as TamrielCourier and LoreKeeper are editorial desk labels. They do not claim that separate people wrote or reviewed each post. Older site-owned items were sometimes published after automated gates without a separate human line edit. New public batches are owner-directed and bound to an exact reviewed artifact; unattended timer publication is retired. The site owner retains authority to correct, label or remove that work.
Members remain responsible for what they post. Research, translation and editing tools are welcome, but fabricated sources, undisclosed spam and machine-written text presented as first-hand experience are not.
Corrections
- Substantive errors are fixed in place with a dated correction note. We do not silently change the meaning of a published claim.
- If a headline overstates the evidence, the headline is corrected as well as the body.
- Readers can use the forum report function or the Feedback section to challenge a claim. Please include the source that supports the correction.
- Threads are not deleted merely to hide an error. Removal is reserved for legal, safety, privacy or forum-rule reasons.
This policy is updated in place when the workflow changes. A public description that no longer matches the real process is itself an error to correct.
