Editorial policy

This page describes exactly how a number gets onto this site, because “we check our facts” is a claim anyone can make and almost nobody can evidence.

The standard

Every figure published here must be transcribed, word for word, from a sentence on a source page that we fetched and read. Government and embassy pages are preferred. The sentence itself is published alongside the figure on each visa page, not merely a link to the page it came from, so you can check it in one click.

If a figure cannot be tied to such a sentence, it is not published. An absent figure is better than a plausible one.

What went wrong the first time

This standard exists because of a specific failure. The first version of this dataset had a source link beside every figure and looked rigorous. When each quote was checked against the live page it was attributed to, 10 of 14 could not be found.

The cause was not carelessness about citation. The quotes had been taken from search-result summaries — machine-written syntheses of those pages, which read exactly like quotations and are not. The citations were real and the pages were real; the sentences were not. Correcting it surfaced 5 substantive errors sitting behind correct-looking citations, all listed at /corrections.

What enforces it

None of the above depends on anyone remembering. The site fails to build if:

a published number has no verbatim quote filed against that specific field; a record claims to be verified while resting on a quote nobody checked against the live page; any record has gone more than 60 days without re-verification; the prose trips a linter that rejects filler, marketing superlatives and undated claims of recency; or an affiliate link is marked live before its terms have been read from the partner’s own dashboard.

A separate weekly job re-fetches every source and checks the quote is still on the page. When a quote stops matching, it usually means the rule changed — which is recorded, dated, on the change timeline.

Confidence is a process claim, not a feeling

3 of 21 visa records currently meet the bar to be labelled verified. The rest render with a visible warning saying they do not. Some sources block automated checking, which means certain figures cannot be machine-verified at all; where that is true the page says so rather than implying more certainty than exists.

How AI is used, and how it is not

Research is assisted by AI tools, and the site’s pages are generated from a structured dataset rather than hand-written one by one. No figure reaches that dataset without a human-readable source sentence transcribed from a page that was actually fetched, and no AI-generated summary is treated as a source. This distinction is the entire subject of the failure described above.

Commercial relationships

The site carries affiliate links, principally for health insurance — which several of these visas legally require, and which is therefore a real conflict of interest. It is described plainly on the disclosure page. The requirement is always stated from the government source before any product is mentioned, and where a visa does not require insurance, the page says so even though saying so costs the sale.

Corrections

Report anything wrong to corrections@asiavisaguide.com. Corrections are published with their date, what was wrong, and why it happened.