Editorial translation; the original Portuguese version prevails in case of discrepancy.

Revalidation methodology

1. Selecting the topic

A topic enters the queue when it is covered by three or more monitored outlets on the same day, or when a reader submits it with at least one primary document. Topics with no primary document that can be located receive the "Not verifiable" label and remain visible as such.

2. Primary documents

Accepted: official statements, technical reports, court rulings, laws and regulations, data from public agencies, letters and official responses, publications signed by the people involved themselves. Every document is recorded with: title, origin, date, link, the literal excerpt used, the file's SHA-256 hash and a timestamp of its first capture in a public archive.

Not accepted as primary: other articles, third-party summaries, social media posts without verifiable authorship.

3. Key claims

Based on the documents, the piece lists three to seven claims a reader needs to know to understand the topic. Each claim cites the document and the excerpt.

4. Reading each article

For each article, the reviewer answers, for every key claim: does it report it? omit it? contradict it?

With the sentence from the article that supports the answer, cited briefly and with a link.

5. Labels

• Confirmed: the article reports all the key claims without contradicting any of them.
• Partial: it reports some of them, without contradicting.
• Omitted: it reports none of the essential claims.
• Contradicts: it states something the primary document denies or attributes to someone else.
• Not verifiable: there is no primary document to compare it with.

The labels describe the article on that topic and on that date. They do not describe the outlet.

6. Automatic review

No piece is published without an automatic review recorded in the file. The locks are cumulative: the piece schema must pass; the technical check must be recorded, with a date, excerpts found or checked and no broken link left unexplained; reviewers A and B, with opposing viewpoints, must have a finding and decisions for every objection; each primary document must have a link, excerpt and SHA-256 hash, public archive capture or method note; the language must not use the house's prohibited words; and titulo_curto must be at most 60 characters. The objections, what was accepted and the points still in dispute are published in the piece itself, together with the technical check of links, excerpts and hashes.

7. Right of reply

Every outlet named receives notice with the link to the piece and a channel to respond. The response is published in full in the piece, with the same prominence, within a maximum of 48 hours of receipt. The response reopens the piece for human review without taking it offline; while reanalysis is open, the piece shows the corresponding notice. If the response shows a Revalida error, the piece changes and the correction is recorded.

8. Updates and versions

Pieces are revalidated when new documents emerge. Every version records what changed. Earlier versions remain accessible.

9. Corrections

Revalida's own errors go to the top of the piece, with date, description and correction.

10. Recusals

Whoever has a professional, financial or personal tie to a named organization does not select, write or review the corresponding piece. The affiliations of those in charge are public.

11. Criticality

Every article read receives, in addition to the label (section 5), a criticality level: how much the ordinary reader's understanding — someone who reads only the headline and the first paragraphs — is harmed by that article. The rule is deterministic, based on the label itself and on what is already recorded in "what was missing" and "note", with no new data:

• Confirmed → Low.
• Partial → Moderate; or High if the omission changes responsibility, authorship, cause or an essential number and that is in the title, the headline or the article's lead.
• Omitted → High.
• Contradicts → Critical; or High if the contradiction is only in the title and the body of the article is consistent with the primary documents.

Every level comes with a justification sentence, citing the very "what was missing" or "note" that supports the classification. Calculated and recorded by scripts/criticidade.py, idempotently: running it again without changing the article's label, "what was missing" or "note" does not alter the file.

12. Adequate interpretation

A score from 0 to 100, averaged across the articles in a piece (or a country, or a continent), converting each criticality level into points: Low = 100, Moderate = 67, High = 33, Critical = 0. It is the complement of the revalidation rate: revalidation says whether the article reported the essentials; adequate interpretation says how much the reader comes away understanding correctly, even when the article does not go so far as to contradict the document. It enters the reliability map's index (factor 4, weight 20%) only where there are at least 10 articles read; below that, the weight is redistributed proportionally among the available factors, and the map's table shows when that happens. Full explanation, examples from pieces already revalidated, the method's limits and the result of the color validation are in docs/METRICAS-CRITICIDADE.md (in Portuguese).