Every entry on this hub carries a corroboration rating, a Checked stamp and a checked link. This page explains the loop that produces them, the ladder behind the ratings, and the publication policy that decides, in advance, what gets published at all.
The Hub is produced by one repeating loop, not by one-off editing.
Sweep the sector's scattered public sources: schemes, regulators, programmes, datasets, investigations, events.
Corroborate each claim across independent sources and rate it. A body publishing about itself counts as one source.
Compose the verified facts into sections, profiles and feeds, every figure attributed and dated.
Re-scan on a set cadence, re-check links, renew stamps, and log every change in the Updates feed.
Material claims are rated by the number, diversity and reliability of the independent sources behind them. Figures are dated to the year they refer to, not just the year they were printed.
Every entry carries a "Checked" stamp: the month its link and entry details were last checked. The verb is deliberate. A stamp says the Hub checked the entry; it does not vouch for every claim on the far side of a link. That is what the corroboration rating is for.
Every external URL is verified with a real request before publication and again on each maintenance pass. A URL the checker has not seen reads "unchecked", and nothing ships on a dead link.
The freshness targets: no entry stamp older than 90 days, a fortnightly changelog through the Updates feed, and automated link health across the whole reference.
Every combination of rating, source type and claim type maps to exactly one publication outcome, so no crawl or maintenance pass ends with an open editorial call. The rules, one sentence each:
The hub is re-scanned on a set cadence. New entries are added, links re-checked, stamps renewed, and every refresh lands in the dated Updates feed, so the reference can be audited as it evolves.
Candidates that fail the bar are parked, not discarded. Leads, unresolved counts, fetch-blocked sources and watch items are logged in a ledger and retried on later passes, so coverage compounds instead of resetting with each crawl.
Planned, and stated as planned: continuous curation by agents on a standing cadence, with crowdsourced feedback from logged-in contributors folded into the same verification loop.
If something is missing, wrong or out of date, say so. Reports are logged when they arrive and handled in the next maintenance pass.
Every expansion or correction to what this hub holds gets a dated entry here.
Open an entry to read what changed.
planetGOLD corpus completed. Three additions close out the planetGOLD record-grain surface. (1) The Library gains the 28 of planetGOLD’s 34 curated key publications not already held as flagship citations, each read from its own planetgold.org page and adversarially verified: finance, technical solutions, market access, formalisation, gender, occupational safety and health, cross-programme analyses and the annual report series. (2) The per-country GEF project records now render as a comparative matrix on the planetGOLD profile: 26 registry-fact rows covering all 27 portfolio countries, every cell shown as on its thegef.org page with a rating, a checked stamp and the source link. (3) Ecuador, the last unpinned country, is confirmed as GEF project 10835 ("GEF GOLD+: Advancing formalization and mercury-free gold in Ecuador", UNDP, USD 4,000,000 grant and USD 33,200,176 co-financing) via the UNDP project document (PIMS 6653); planetGOLD’s own cited GEF ID 9203 is the earlier UNDP chemicals programme, not the GOLD+ child project.
Governance and Funders expansion. Added two Mining-cluster directories: Governance & institutions (the IGF, IISD, IIED and NRGI, with a full IGF profile page covering its Mining Policy Framework, the November 2025 Global Coalition for Action on ASGM with the World Bank and World Gold Council, and its funding) and Funders & faith (fourteen charity-sector actors that fund or campaign on responsible gold, from the Tiffany & Co. Foundation, Cartier Philanthropy, Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations to faith bodies including the Church and Mining Network, the Vatican Dicastery for Integral Human Development, ICCR, CAFOD, Caritas, CIDSE, Misereor and Franciscans International). Each record carries an honest gold-relevance note, since many work across all extractives.
Maintain pass. Re-verified all 15 open frontier leads and the 6 parked candidates against live sources: no material change since the founding build (both LBMA incident reviews still open with the refiners still on the Good Delivery List, RGG v10 and Fairmined 3.0 still in consultation or stalled, the EU list of responsible smelters still unpublished, Gold Demand Trends Q2 2026 not yet out). Corrections and additions: the CMSI Final Consultation Report date fixed to 12 March 2026; the DMCC Rules pinned to Version 2 (2020); the RJC certified-vs-total member split added (about 1,644 certified of roughly 2,000); the GoldBod traceability procurement updated (27 bidders, technical evaluation, no vendor awarded); a Swissaid UAE gold-import figure added (316 t / CHF 27bn, Jan-Sep 2025), corrected from a mislabelled "total Swiss imports" framing. Link health re-checked: 100 URLs, all live except the known Borsa Istanbul TLS case.
Founding build. Two-round source-rated crawl (10 clusters, gap sweep, adversarial verification) distilled into 100+ rated records across 8 directories, 8 flagship profiles, 9 method-tagged number spreads, a 38-entry dated feed and a 12-document library. Publication policy P1-P9 adopted; every record link liveness-checked.
Crawl is a DAAC product: an agentic engine that scans a sector's scattered public sources, verifies findings by corroboration, organises them into a navigable hub, and maintains their freshness. This hub runs on it, alongside DAAC's other reference hubs.
Mason is a DAAC product: the builder behind this site. It shapes what Crawl gathers into pages that read the same way across every DAAC reference, and holds one standard of structure, language and accessibility as the material grows.