Editorial policy

Seafarerindex is a reference site for the working seafarer. Every hand-authored entry — the ~700 reference pages, ~600 glossary terms, ~250 ranks + safety + health + scam entries, ~90 career + compare pages — is written to survive contact with a Master or Chief Engineer who is preparing for an oral exam, negotiating a contract, or standing on a bridge in a casualty. This page documents how that content is sourced + verified, how corrections work, and how the site stays independent.

Sourcing

Primary sources first. IMO instruments (SOLAS, MARPOL, STCW, MLC, COLREGs), ILO conventions (C186, C108, C185), IACS unified requirements, class-society rules, flag-state notices, MoU inspection publications, ITF collective agreements. Where the primary source is available, it's cited.
Industry publications. ISGOTT (OCIMF), Nautical Institute + BIMCO + INTERTANKO guidance, class-society technical bulletins, Baltic Exchange indices, ITF/IBF publications. Named in the See Also + Sources sections of every page.
Casualty reports. MAIB (UK), NTSB Marine (US), BEA-Mer (France), JTSB (Japan), TSB (Canada), ATSB (Australia), DMAIB (Denmark). Every disaster page cites the investigation authority + report reference.
Wikipedia. Used only for entity summaries + historical context on named ships + companies + ports — never as sole source for regulatory or safety claims.
What we don't use. Anonymous social-media posts. Paywalled news reporting cited without independent verification. Claims from operators about their own safety record.

Content generation

Hand-authored. Every reference page + glossary term + safety entry + health entry + scam entry + rank + compare entry + disaster entry is written by a human against primary + industry sources. No LLM-generated content is published without human review + attribution.
Cache-warm + hand-review pattern. Automated fetching from public sources (via self-hosted Firecrawl for background + citation-gathering) is used to warm a source cache. Every entry that references the cache is human-authored. We do NOT extract structured data via LLM + publish it — extraction fabricates rows.
Translations. Hub-intro locale content for Hindi, Bahasa Indonesia, Russian, Chinese, Filipino is human-reviewed. Detail-page translations are on the roadmap but not yet published.

Confidence classification

Every hand-authored entry carries an editorial confidence level:

High. Referenced against primary + industry sources; cross-verified across multiple citations; not likely to require significant revision without a change to the underlying regulation. Most reference + glossary pages.
Medium. Best current understanding based on multiple sources but where the underlying regulation or practice is still developing (e.g. MASS Code, MEPC 83 Net-Zero Framework, ammonia dual-fuel operations).
Low. Limited direct sourcing or an evolving area where practice varies substantially. Rarely used; flags a low-confidence entry to the reader.

Confidence badges are surfaced on entry pages next to the Last Verified date.

Last verified dates

Every reference + safety + health + scam + rank + document entry carries a Last Verified date. The date is set by the human editor at the time of last review against the source — not the ISO date of the last file save. When a source materially updates (e.g. MSC session, new MEPC resolution), the affected entries are re-verified + the date bumped.

Corrections + reader submissions

Corrections page. /corrections lists accepted corrections + when they landed.
Submitting. Email [email protected] with the URL + the correction + a citation for the corrected fact. Priority given to submissions with citations to primary + industry sources.
Response time. Straightforward factual corrections (typos, wrong dates, wrong citations) applied within 5 business days. Larger revisions may take longer with a note published while under review.
What we don't change. Editorial judgements about the significance of a casualty or a regulatory action are not changed on request. Legal-take-down requests are evaluated against public-interest journalism norms.

Independence + funding

Independent. Not a shipowner, ship manager, manning agency, training centre, class society, insurer, or union. No commercial affiliations with any of the entities named on this site.
No affiliate revenue on operator + agency + centre listings. The listings of manning agencies, training centres, welfare organisations, P&I clubs, insurers, and shipowners are editorial. There is no pay-for-placement + no affiliate-link revenue from any listing.
Advertising. None at present. Should this change, ads will be clearly labelled + reader-controlled + will not affect any editorial ranking or listing.
Personal-tool tools. Certificate expiry tracker, notification preferences, corrections form — all handled through the site's own infrastructure without third-party data sharing.

Conflict of interest

Where an editor is a current or former seafarer or shore-side employee of a company named on this site, the conflict is declared in the entry footnote + a second editor reviews the page independently. This applies proportionally — a Master who worked for Maersk 10 years ago does not need to declare on a general Maersk entry; a current employee would.