Editorial standards

What this document is for

Verity exists to separate the information from the invoice. Almost everything else written about a procedure was written by someone who profits from a booking. This standard is the set of constraints that stop our writing from becoming that.

It applies to procedure guides (wikis) and to articles published on Verity. It does not apply to messages between a patient and a practitioner, to booking requests, or to what a patient writes in a community. Those have their own rules, and mixing them into an editorial standard would pretend they were the same kind of text.

Independence from whoever bills for the procedure

Educational content is drafted and medically reviewed on its own terms. A practitioner who stands to gain from a procedure does not get to shape the page that explains it.

No clinic owns an entry. No placement is sold inside one. Contributing to a page is not the same as sponsoring it. A practitioner who has been verified can propose a change. They cannot pay to soften a risk, to bury a complication, or to move their name up a list of who performs the procedure.

This page does not restate how Verity earns. The commercial model and the editorial standard are kept apart on purpose. If a future revenue line would require this document to change, the change belongs here in writing — not as a quiet exception on a product page.

Two kinds of writing, on purpose

A wiki is the reference layer: one entry per procedure, written to be consulted, and kept current on purpose. It is the page you should be able to read the night before a consultation. Deep enough that a student could revise from it; plain enough that it does not hide behind jargon.

An article is the editorial layer: everything around the decision that a single procedure page cannot hold. Finding a surgeon, whether you actually need the operation, practical recovery, advances in the field. An article is attributed, dated, and not quietly rewritten later. Where a wiki is maintained, an article stays what it was on the day it ran.

The two are not lumped together, because they are not the same job and they do not follow the same write path.

How a wiki is written

Verity drafts the entry. It is medically reviewed before it is published. Verified professionals may then propose contributions to keep it current — unpaid, credited on their profile, and reviewed the same way the first draft was. A wiki contribution is proposed and reviewed before it publishes. It is then credited to the contributor permanently.

Wiki contributions are reviewed by Verity before publication. The reviewer and the date sit on the page, so its currency is a fact you can read rather than something you assume.

Most entries cover the same ground: what the procedure actually is, who it suits and who it does not, risks named plainly, what recovery looks like in days rather than adjectives, what results really look like, a price range per market, who performs it, and the sources and reviewers the entry is built on. That is what most entries cover, not a fixed template we pretend every page already follows.

How an article is written

Articles are published by verified professionals and by Verity. Verity posts as one more account rather than a house voice: no special label, no favoured placement. There is no fixed shape and no schedule. They appear when there is something worth saying.

An article carries its author and the day it was published. It is not a living reference. If the underlying evidence moves, the correction belongs on the wiki, or in a new article that says so — not as a silent rewrite of the old one.

What is shown on a finished page

Educational content that has been medically reviewed records who reviewed it and when. Where a statement rests on published work, the entry cites it, and says when the citation was last checked.

Unsettled questions are labelled as unsettled rather than written around. Anything not built yet is described as not built yet. We would rather a gap on the page than a sentence that sounds finished and is not.

Price ranges

A procedure entry publishes a price range per market, not “request a quote”. Withheld pricing exists to get you into a consultation, where the number arrives beside a deposit deadline. It also makes an unusually low quote impossible to read as the warning it usually is.

Ranges are drawn from published and industry sources at launch — professional bodies, national registries and the sector’s own reporting — with Verity’s own platform data folded in as it accumulates. Each range should show what it is based on and when it was last revised. A price moves with the surgeon, the facility, the complexity of the case, and what the quote does and does not include. The entry should say which of those are usually inside the number.

Set a country and the clinical content does not change. The money and the regulator do.

Who may contribute, and who may not

Only practitioners who have already passed verification can write or expand a wiki page, and every contribution is credited to their profile. Patients do not write wikis. Clinics do not write wikis under the organisation’s name in order to advertise a procedure.

A practitioner who is not yet verified cannot publish. Claiming a founding spot is not a listing, and it is not an editorial credential.

What this standard does not cover

A patient review, a community note, and a thread about a practitioner are written by patients. They are not editorial, they are not medically reviewed as a wiki is, and a professional cannot have them taken down by asking. Those rules live with the product, not in this document.

A practitioner’s profile — procedures, price ranges, credentials checked by Verity — is their listing, kept current by them, with credentials locked so they cannot type a licence into it. That is not an article.

When a page is wrong

If something here is wrong, we want it in writing. Flag the page, or write to hello@verity.online with the subject “Correction”.

Corrections are logged and dated rather than quietly swapped in overnight. A wiki is then updated because it is maintained. An article that was wrong on a matter of fact may carry a note, or be followed by a later piece; it is not silently replaced as if the first version never ran.

What we will not do

We will not sell the wording of a risk. We will not let a clinic own an entry. We will not treat a wiki contribution and an article as the same write path. We will not describe future product behaviour as if it had already shipped.