The badge on every published entry: each load-bearing statement was checked against the public sources listed on that page before it went live. It is deliberately not the same claim as a line-by-line human fact-check.
🤖 This definition was generated with AI from the sources linked throughout. It has not had a complete human review — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources. How this works.
Source-checked is what the ◆ badge on a published entry means: before publication, every load-bearing statement in it was checked against the public sources listed at the bottom of the same page. The working rule is two independent sources, or one authoritative one, for anything the entry actually rests on. Drafts that do not hold up stay unpublished rather than being softened until they pass.
The wording is chosen carefully, and the words it avoids matter as much as the one it uses. Research and summaries here are AI-assisted, so this atlas does not claim a line-by-line human fact-check, and does not describe itself as reviewed by an editorial staff — both would mean a person read every line, which is not what happened. Where a person has read every claim and signed it, the page says so by name, and only then.
What the check does catch is worth seeing in practice. The widely repeated ridership figure for the Busan–Gimhae light rail turned out to be the line's design capacity rather than the forecast it was quoted as, and Delhi's smog towers carry the operating agency's own arithmetic showing what the approach would have required to work. Neither survives a look at the underlying sources — which is the point of listing them.
So treat a source-checked entry as a map into the record, not a substitute for it: follow the sources, and tell us when something is off.
Added 2026-08-25 · Part of the growing Smart City Glossary