The pages behind how we work
How the site works. Meet the writing and review process, and see how we explain our limits.
The main aim of this site is a panel of independent volunteer dentists for each of its languages, so that a reader can put questions about a treatment plan to a dentist who speaks the reader's own language.
Panel today: one independent volunteer dentist, covering English, French and Arabic.
This part of the site describes the site itself rather than any treatment: where a statement comes from, who writes and who reviews it, what happens when something published turns out to be wrong, and what share of the material rests on a primary source. Each page listed below answers a question of that kind.
What belongs in this section
A page belongs here when its subject is this site's own machinery: the route a claim travels before it is published, the standards that bind whoever writes it, the record of what has been corrected, and the audit of what our published claims rest on. Nothing in this section describes a procedure or a national rule. Those parts of the site are separate, and a page sits in this one or in one of those, never in both.
The list below is not maintained by hand. It is read back from what is published in this language, so a page appears on publication and drops out on withdrawal. Work still in preparation is absent from it, and that absence describes where we are in the work rather than what a subject is worth.
Pages in this section
How we check what we publish
The method behind every claim on this site: sourcing, evidence labels, review and correction.
Editorial standards, independence and corrections
Who writes here, who reviews it, how independence is kept and how mistakes are corrected.
Corrections log
Every correction made to this site, in the order it was made. Append-only.
Evidence audit
What share of our published claims carries a primary source — published as measured, including when it is poor.
How a page is approved before it is published
The stages a text passes through before it appears here, the role that signs it, what a signature is made of, and what happens to a page that nobody signs.
Every page on this site
A complete index of what is published in English here, grouped by subject.
Site search
A search box for the pages published here. It runs in the browser, and nothing typed into it is sent anywhere.