How this site keeps its figures honest

Every figure carries its source and its age

Under every tool is the name of its source, with a link: Sarai Shahzada for the market rate, Open-Meteo for the weather, the World Food Programme for prices, OpenStreetMap for hospitals, the US Geological Survey for earthquakes. Next to the figure is when it was checked. On a Friday, when Sarai Shahzada is closed, the rate says it was set on Thursday afternoon rather than pretending to be new.

Nobody types the numbers in

The figures are read from their sources by scheduled jobs, not copied by hand: the exchange rate and earthquakes every half hour, weather and gold every hour, prices and the hospital directory every day. A person copying numbers makes mistakes and goes on holiday; a scheduled job does neither.

Readings that cannot be true are refused

Each reading is checked before it is shown. A market rate far from the central bank's, or one that disagrees with the world's cross rates, is set aside. A temperature no Afghan city has ever had is a broken reading, not weather. When a source sends nonsense, the site keeps the last good figure and shows its age, instead of showing the nonsense.

When a source stops, someone is told

If a source fails for longer than it should, an alert goes out by email, and another when it recovers. Meanwhile the page keeps working with the last good figure and says how old it is.

No red and green

A rising dollar is bad news for a shop that imports and good news for a family receiving money from abroad. So the site shows which way a figure moved with an arrow, never with the colours of good and bad.

You can correct us

Every page with figures has a form to report one that is wrong, and a person reads every report. Hospitals and pharmacies come from OpenStreetMap, which anyone can edit: fix a place there and this site picks up the change within the week. Each guide lists its sources and the date its facts were checked, and is checked again on a schedule.

What is not collected

The site counts how many times each page is read, by language and kind of device, without cookies and without storing anything that identifies a reader. There are no advertisements and no trackers.

If you see a figure that is wrong, use the "Report a wrong figure" form at the bottom of its page.