Methodology · Story Quality
Story Quality & Publishing Gates
Not every article that enters Updat3 becomes a story. Here is how we decide what has enough multi-source support to show in the feed.
Text quality tiers
Every article gets a content score from 0–100 based on how much usable text we can extract. Articles score higher when we have access to the full body text, not just a headline or excerpt.
Headline only
< 200 chars of text · Content score 0–18
Not used for story summaries
Excerpt
200–2,500 chars of text · Content score 18–52
Used with caution; summary may be thin
Full text
> 2,500 chars of text · Content score 52–100
Full article text available, richer context
Publishing gates
A story only appears in the feed when it passes all of the following checks:
Filters out blank or corrupt entries
Ensures a real summary exists, not just a headline copy
Ensures the Updat3 brief reports the whole account, not a summary
Every sentence must carry a verifiable anchor (a dated event, a named law or ruling, a named person in a named role, or a figure with its year); unanchored sentences are removed before publication
Prevents single-fact stub stories
Filters stories too vague to be useful
Feed ranking
Stories that pass the publishing gates are ranked in the feed by a decay-weighted score:
score = decayFactor × 100 + log₂(sources) × 4 + importance × 0.3Where decayFactor halves every 18 hours, sources is the number of linked articles, and importance is an editorial weight (0–10) assigned when a story is written up.
A story is never published from a single outlet, however important it is. A new story with one outlet waits while the corroboration search (every 15 minutes) looks for a second, independent outlet; if none is found within about two days it is retired unpublished. An outlet counts toward corroboration even when we may only link to its reporting, not quote it.