How it works

Evidence first. Publishing second.

Every story on elseif is made the same way, by the same automated pipeline, in five steps. Nothing here is a person's judgement.

1. 1. Read the press in other languages

   The pipeline reads the feeds of the outlets listed on the sources page, market by market, and groups the items that report the same event into one story.

2. 2. Rank the day

   Each story is scored on what kind of event it is, how well it fits this site's beat, and how fresh it is. Only the highest scoring few per market per day go any further, so a quiet day produces fewer stories rather than thinner ones.

3. 3. Keep only what another language reported

   A story is queued only when it was reported in a language other than English, and only when elseif has not already published that source. A story from an English-language outlet is refused here, and so is a story whose source page is too thin to write a brief from.

4. 4. Write an original English brief

   A language model reads the source page and writes a new brief in English, from the facts the source states and nothing else. It keeps the source's hedging, takes any figure from the source exactly, and never converts a currency. A story that turns out not to be about AI models, AI agents or agent harnesses is dropped at this point.

5. 5. Check the draft three ways

   Three checks run before anything is published, and a draft that fails any one of them is rejected rather than corrected:

   • The grounding check. A second model, not the one that wrote the draft, reads the draft against the source and scores how much of it the source actually supports. A draft below the bar, or one the check reports as overstating its source, is rejected.
   • The copied-words check. The draft is compared with the source run of words by run of words. A draft assembled out of the source's own phrasing is rejected, and so is any single long passage lifted from it.
   • The duplicate check. A draft carrying a headline elseif has already published, or written from a source elseif has already used, is rejected.

There is no human editor

No person reads a draft before it goes live. The checks above are the whole review. They are written to reject a doubtful draft rather than to improve it, because nobody is waiting to improve it.

Reporting an error

If a story gets something wrong, write to [email protected] with the address of the page. Name the claim and, where you can, the part of the source that contradicts it. The source address of any story is published with the story: the page's structured data carries it as isBasedOn, and so does the plain-text copy served at the story's address plus .md.