Editorial policy

How a page is written

Every guide on this site starts from a single question a reader could ask out loud, and it is finished only when the body of the page answers it. The structure is fixed on purpose: what the gesture is, what it asks of you, the part that is usually done badly, and the honest limit of the whole thing.

The last of those is the one we treat as compulsory. A page that tells you how to do something and not when it is pointless is only half written, and it is the half that wastes people's Saturdays. Where a gesture only works if a condition holds, the condition is stated on the page rather than discovered by the reader.

We also hold a rule about headings: a heading that is not followed by a real answer is an unfinished page, not a short one. Pages are published when they are finished, and length is a symptom rather than a target.

Sources and checking

This guide describes general practice: how shelters organise walking rotas, why bedding is consumed, how a transport relay is built, what a foster record is for. That kind of material is checked against how the work is actually organised, and it is written at the level of generality it can honestly support.

Three rules follow from that, and they constrain what you will find here.

• No invented precision. We do not print a statistic, a price, a survival rate or a proportion that we cannot stand behind. Where a number would be useful and is not available, the page gives you the structure to work it out locally and tells you whom to ask.
• No invented experience. Nothing here is presented as something the desk personally witnessed, and no anecdote is dressed up as a case. Where an example helps, it is constructed to show a shape and is labelled as constructed.
• Local variation is named, not smoothed over. Laws on strays and found animals, veterinary rules and shelter policy differ between countries and sometimes between towns. Pages say so and point at the authority that decides, rather than picking one country and hoping.

Dates and updates

Each guide carries the date of its last substantive revision, and that date is the real one. We do not refresh dates to make a page look recent, and we do not backdate a page to make the site look older than it is.

When a page is rewritten because the advice changed, the date moves and the change is real. When a typographic error is fixed, the date does not move, because nothing a reader relies on has changed.

Corrections

Errors are corrected on the page, not hidden. Where a correction changes what a reader should do, we say on the page what was wrong, because someone may have acted on the old version, and a silent edit leaves them with advice they now cannot trace.

Anyone can ask for a correction and no standing is required: a volunteer, a member of shelter staff, or a reader who noticed a contradiction between two pages. Send the page address and the sentence to contact@50ways.org. We would rather receive a blunt correction than a polite silence, and shelter staff who tell us that a page misdescribes their work are doing this guide the biggest favour available to it.

What we will not do is remove a page because someone dislikes its conclusion, or add a recommendation because someone asked. The rules on that are on the sponsored content page.