How the record is assembled

An automated agent runs three times a day (00:00, 08:00 and 16:00, South African time) against a fixed list of South African publications and searches for new reporting on this case. The list of outlets is deliberately narrow: national and regional newsrooms with an editor, plus the local Ekurhuleni titles that cover the area closely.

Social media posts and community groups are not sources. They are often where something is first said, and they are also where the wrong name, the wrong place and the wrong number circulate fastest.

For each article the agent proposes a structured entry: which person it concerns, which place, what date, and how the article connects them. It records how confident it is, and it records which sentence of which article each proposed fact came from.

There are things it is not permitted to propose at all. It cannot create a suspect: no such record exists in this system. It cannot attach a name to a record the courts or a family have restricted. It cannot place a point at a street address. It cannot assert that a death belongs to this series — only that an outlet reported that it does.

Nothing the agent proposes goes live on its own. A person opens each proposed change next to the article it came from and checks four things: that the source says what the entry claims, that the outlet is named and the link works, that the record is allowed to be published in this form, and that the verification state matches the evidence actually available.

Changes are then published, edited or rejected. Rejections are kept, because a pattern of the same wrong inference is itself useful.

A published record shows its sources, the state of the evidence behind it, and a dated history of every change made to it. Only a headline, a short extract and a link are stored from any article — the full text is never republished here.

If the automated side of this fails, the site keeps serving the last good version of the record rather than showing an error or an empty map. A stale record is recoverable; a wrong one is not.

Corrections and removal requests go to [email protected].