Editorial standards

• Primary records first. Stories are reported from the document itself: a Town notice, staff report, agenda, minutes, school board report, provincial registry or official dataset. The documents are listed and linked at the foot of every story, with the date each was retrieved.
• Every fact is checked against its source. Names, figures, dates, addresses and the stage a process has reached are checked against the cited document before publication. A claim we cannot source is left out.
• Another outlet is a tip, never a source. We do not rewrite or republish other publications' journalism. Anything learned elsewhere is verified in the primary record, and the primary record is cited.
• No invention. No composite or invented quotes, no unnamed sources standing in for reporting we have not done, no rumour presented as news.

• Say whose claim it is. A figure or statement that comes from an applicant, a campaign or an organisation is attributed to them, not presented as established fact.
• Proposals are not approvals. We say which stage a planning application, budget or by-law has reached, and never describe a proposal as decided.
• No boundaries we cannot source. School attendance areas are set by the school boards, and neighbourhoods have no legal boundary in Oakville. A distance is never presented as a catchment.
• Honest dates. A story shows the date OakvilleIQ published it and the date it was last updated. We never re-date a story to make it look new; a story about an older event says when that event happened.

OakvilleIQ endorses no candidate and gives no candidate more prominence than another. Candidate lists, dates and results come from the municipal clerk's official publications. Results are reported only as the clerk publishes them, labelled unofficial until certified, and never estimated or called early.

A corrected story keeps its address and shows an updated date. A correction that changes the meaning of a story is recorded in a dated note on the story and listed on the corrections page. Typographical fixes and repaired links are made without a note, because the substance has not changed.

OakvilleIQ is not affiliated with the Town of Oakville or Halton Region, either school board, any political campaign or any real estate business. It has no sponsors or advertisers, and no one outside the publication sees a story before it is published or decides what it covers. If OakvilleIQ ever accepts sponsorship or advertising, or anyone involved in it has an interest in a story, that will be disclosed — on this page before the arrangement takes effect, and on the story itself.

Pages about parks, heritage properties, development applications, schools and other places are built from official datasets, named with their publisher, licence and retrieval date on the data and sources page. They report what those records say. Where a record is out of date or the public body has changed it, we update the page from the newer record.