Public-Interest Charter

1 · The wiki stays free

Every article at /wiki/[slug] is free to read, with no signup, no paywall, no rate limit, no ad slot, no sponsored content. The catalog JSON (/wiki/catalog/json) and CSV (/wiki/catalog/csv) are CORS-open for secondary analysis. The ?asOf=YYYY-MM-DD permanent-citation URLs remain stable for the life of the archive (see methodology §6). If the project ever ends, the catalog will be archived to a neutral home (Internet Archive, Wikipedia's data dumps, or equivalent) with the same URL structure preserved as long as is technically feasible.

2 · Editorial independence from commercial customers

Current state (2026-05-31): the founding editor (Ryan Wong) reviews all catalog rows. The editorial board is in formation — 1 of 6 named subject-editor slots filled, with the remaining 5 under active recruitment (target: ≥3 by Q4 2026). Until ≥3 editors are in place, (a) the four-layer firewall below is structurally weaker than it will be at full bench (one person wears editorial + commercial-lead hats), (b) the firehose is not commercially marketed (per §4 below), and (c) any paid pilot engagement is disclosed on /wiki/funding §3 within 30 days. The current-state honest disclosure is the most important sentence on this page for a regulator-side or foundation-officer cite-check.

Catalog editorial decisions — which instruments to track, which topics to include, which confidence tier to assign a cell, whether to mark a topic contested or settled — cannot be influenced by who is paying us. The structural enforcement of this rule has four layers:

• Catalog-as-source-of-truth. Articles render from typed catalog rows in src/lib/international-governance/instruments.ts and sibling files. There is no per-tenant theming, no sponsor-injected content path, no commercial-flag branch. A paying customer cannot get a different article than a free reader.
• Public register of paying customers. Every customer appears on /wiki/funding §3 within 30 days of contract signing, with the relationship spelled out. A reader who suspects bias can check the register against the article in question.
• Recusal on topics with a customer stake. When the editorial board considers a substantive update to a topic where a paying customer has a direct stake (e.g. a firm regulated by the instrument), the customer-facing interaction is recused and the decision is recorded as recused in the changelog (see CorrectionRecord with type recusal).
• No private-only catalog content. The paid firehose serves the same catalog rows that the free wiki shows. It adds latency-SLA + structured-delta + webhook delivery on top — never private editorial content.

3 · Honest disclosure of editorial gaps

We publish what we know andwhat we don't. The editorial board (/wiki/editorial-board) is in formation — 1 of 6 slots filled — and we say so on the page rather than implying a fuller bench than exists. The /wiki/meta dashboard discloses every cell that is editorial-confidence pending rather than asserting uniform confidence. The methodology §6 page distinguishes catalog-determinism reproducibility from research-claim reproducibility — those are different things and we will not conflate them to inflate the trust signal.

4 · Commercial / editorial firewall (firehose design)

The paid SLA-backed JSON firehose for enterprise compliance teams is the primary planned monetisation. Before any contract is signed, the firewall design below is operative:

• Firehose subscribers receive the same catalog rows available at /wiki/catalog/json, delivered with structured deltas + webhook push + change-of-state metadata. No private content. No private editorial.
• Sales and commercial conversations are handled by the founder + future commercial lead; editorial reviews are handled by the editorial board. Until the board has ≥3 named editors, this firewall is structurally weak (one person wears both hats) and the firehose is not commercially marketed. However, the firehose may launch as a limited paid pilot with one named foundation or regulator partner before the board reaches ≥3, provided: (a) the pilot is disclosed on /wiki/funding §3 within 7 days of contract signing; (b) the pilot customer's identity + the editorial-influence-firewall terms are public; (c) the editorial-board recruitment timeline is published on /wiki/goals with concrete monthly milestones. This decoupling (iter-312) lets product evidence inform board recruitment instead of waiting for board to inform product launch — see board-recruiter Finding #8 in the iter-312 audit transcript for the rationale.
• Firehose contracts do not grant the customer any right to: request a specific instrument be added or removed, request a cell confidence be raised or lowered, embargo a catalog change, or receive advance notice of an editorial position. They grant: machine-readable access, latency SLA, technical support, audit logs.
• Any commercial customer that requests editorial influence (even informally) is recorded on /wiki/funding §3 with the request named, and the contract is reviewed by the editorial board for termination.

4.5 · Paid-services sponsor firewall

The eight productised services at /wiki/services (Premium Exports, API, Change Feed, Procurement Evidence Packs, Human-Validated Evidence Packs, Expert Interview Add-On, Implementation Case Study, AGI Social Scientist Research Sprint) extend the §4 firehose firewall design to all paid commercial work:

• Sponsored coverage rules. No sponsor controls the conclusions of any catalog row, research module, or evidence pack. Sponsor-funded research can influence whichquestions are prioritised — never the answers reached. Findings adverse to the sponsor ship without modification (or aren't shipped at all; we do not produce favourable-to-sponsor outputs to order).
• Disclosure rules for paid evidence packs. Every deliverable names the funder on the cover; the funder's identity, the commission date, and the scope description appear on /wiki/funding §3 within 7 days of commission, not at deliverable time.
• Research-module sponsor firewall. Validators on the on-demand expert validation bench are sourced independently of the sponsor for any module they validate. Sponsor cannot suggest validators; sponsor cannot review validator selection. Validator independence is documented per-module in the ValidationRecord row visible on the rendered /wiki/research/[slug] page.
• Sponsor cannot delay publication. Research-module outputs publish on the commissioned timeline; the sponsor may not gate publication contingent on findings. Pre-publication review is limited to a 48-hour factual-accuracy check (correcting numerical or citation errors, NOT softening interpretations).
• Sponsored output is part of the reusable evidence graph. Every paid deliverable contributes structured fields back to the catalog (CaseStudy rows, CoverageCell rationale extensions, ResearchModule.findings JSON) so the public evidence graph grows with each engagement. This makes the sponsor-PW relationship structurally additive rather than extractive.
• Sponsor breach = published incident. If a sponsor pressures Policy Window to soften, omit, or delay findings, the incident is recorded on /wiki/changelog tagged sponsor-firewall-breach with the request named, regardless of contract terms. Contract terms claiming confidentiality over such requests are non-binding per this charter commitment.

5 · Content licensing

Catalog content (article pages, coverage matrix, methodology pages) is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, redistribute, transform, and build upon the content for any purpose including commercial use, provided you attribute it to Policy Window with a link back to the source page and indicate any modifications. Code in the public repository is published under MIT licence.

Quoted primary-source text (e.g. excerpts from the EU AI Act) is reproduced under fair-use / fair-dealing for purposes of comment, criticism, and education; the underlying copyright of quoted text remains with its original holder.

6 · Retraction + correction policy

When a catalog cell is found to be wrong, the response is to file a correction record (CorrectionRecord in the schema) with: the original claim, the corrected claim, the supporting source, and the date of correction. The correction is appended to the catalog row and surfaced on the article footer and on /wiki/changelog. Published article text is never silently mutated; the historical ArticleRevision snapshot remains accessible via ?asOf=<ISO> so readers can audit the change. Major retractions (e.g. removing an entire instrument or topic because the underlying source was misread) get a dedicated changelog entry with rationale.

7 · Out of scope

Policy Window does not, and will not, do the following — these are bright lines, not aspirations:

• Lobbying on behalf of an external client, or ghostwritten / astroturfed advocacy (§7.1.b). (As of 2026-06-03, PW's own evidence-based advocacy is permitted under §7.1, under strict conditions — it is no longer an absolute prohibition.)
• Political microtargeting, persuasion campaigns, or covert-influence operations.
• Issuing public "failed-reproducibility" verdicts on specific papers without human replication review — see the forthcoming /wiki/reproducibility-policy.
• High-stakes individual decision support (criminal sentencing, asylum determination, medical triage).
• Auto-publication of any output to a public surface without an audited human approval. (Carved out in escalating scope: §7.10 (2026-06-13) — AI-authored/reviewed prose tiers; §7.11 (2026-06-15) — additive AI catalog curation; and §7.12 (2026-06-16) — the AGI Social Scientist as the primary catalog author. Each is conspicuously labelled, reduced-confidence where applicable, and kill-switch-reversible. The prohibition is no longer absolute for wiki prose or catalog content; it remains absolute for every other surface — financial actions, persuasion/microtargeting, unapproved human-subject research, and high-stakes individual decision support.)
• Publishing AI-assisted article prose without the §7.9 guardrails (named-editor review, provenance disclosure, primary-source citation, audited human approval) — see §7.9 below.

7.1 · Evidence-based advocacy — permitted (revised 2026-06-03)

Policy Window MAY publish analytical positions, policy recommendations, regulatory-submission contributions, hearing-testimony evidence packs, and amicus-brief evidence appendices, where all of the following hold:

• (a) the position is grounded in primary-source evidence catalogued under the standard editorial process, and it discloses material catalogued evidence that cuts against it;
• (b)the named PW subject editor takes personal accountability, and any coalition co-signatories are additionally named — PW's name and its named editor appear on every published position without exception (§7.1.b);
• (c) the position is publicly attributable and reproducibly derivable from the cited cells;
• (d) the §4.5 sponsor firewall is observed (no editorial-conditioned funding; no per-output payment for advocacy outputs);
• (e) the position is presented as evidence-grounded analysis. A recommendation is permitted only where a neutral domain expert, reading the cited cells, would find them sufficient and proportionate to support it; where it depends on a contestable value premise (a risk-tolerance choice, a rights trade-off, a distributional judgment), PW states that premise explicitly and presents the strongest opposing view.

§7.1.a Ideologically-driven advocacy — prohibited.

A position is ideologically-driven — and out of scope — where (i) the cited evidence, read by a neutral domain expert, is insufficient to support it; (ii) it omits material catalogued evidence that cuts against it (selective citation); or (iii) it rests on a value premise PW has not stated explicitly and paired with the strongest opposing view. Tracing a position to some cited cells is necessary but not sufficient — the evidence must be proportionate to the claim. No positions based on partisan affiliation, ideological prior, sponsor preference, or covert influence aims.

§7.1.b Lobbying on behalf of an external client — prohibited.

PW does not produce advocacy branded as a client's own, ghostwritten lobbying material, or astroturfing content. PW's name plus the named editor appear on every published position.

§7.1.c Disagreement-resolution still binds.

The §7.2 procedure applies to advocacy outputs: any party (including affected communities) may register dissent against a published position; PW publishes the dissent alongside.

§7.1 definitions.

• Client — any external party that commissions, pays for, or conditions funding on a specific advocacy output or its conclusion. A party that merely requests PW consider a topic, instrument, or correction is not a client (such requests are evaluated on merit — see below).
• Coalition co-signatory— a named external organisation that endorses a PW-authored, PW-initiated position; never a replacement for PW's named-editor accountability.
• Editorial cycle — a calendar quarter (the unit for the §7.5 cap).
• Position-piece (advocacy output) — one distinct published advocacy artefact of any type listed above; counts once against the §7.5 cap and triggers the §7.8 logging obligation.

§7.1 operative threshold + sunset.

Operative threshold: adoption of this wording does not by itself authorise any advocacy output. No position-piece is published under §7.1 until the editorial board reaches ≥3 named subject editors (the §8 amendment threshold); until then §7.1 is adopted text whose operative effect is suspended, with status on /wiki/editorial-board. Sunset: §7.1 (with §7.1.a–§7.1.c) is reviewed 12 months after adoption; absent affirmative re-adoption by a ≥3-editor board, it reverts to the prior absolute prohibition on client lobbying.

What "no lobbying" never meant — editorial requests are welcome.

Editorial requests from affected communities, civil-society organisations, regulators, and independent researchers are not lobbying. Policy Window accepts proposals for topic additions, instrument updates, coverage corrections, classification challenges, or new harm-narrative content, evaluated on merit — does the primary source exist, does it fit the catalog schema, is there demonstrated demand — not on whether the proposer is running a campaign. The proposer's identity is noted in the change record; their campaign goals don't determine whether the change ships. See /wiki/for-advocates for the structured contribution path.

7.2 · Disagreement-resolution procedure

Coverage cells, decision-support answers, and editorial classifications can be wrong. When a delegation, civil-society coalition, regulator, or independent researcher disputes a claim, the resolution path is:

1. File a structured challenge via a GitHub issue (or email to editorial@policywindow.org for those without GitHub access) naming: the disputed cell or claim, the proposed alternative, the primary source backing the alternative, and the disputing party's identity + any COI.
2. Initial editorial response within 30 days from the day the challenge is filed. Response is either (a) accept — cell updated, change recorded; (b) reject with reasoning; or (c) escalate to additional editors for review.
3. If escalated: at least 2 editors review, target second-stage response within 60 days. Until the board has ≥3 named editors, escalation reviews require an explicit acknowledgement that no fully-independent panel is yet available; the response will name who reviewed.
4. Published disagreement record:when a substantive disagreement persists after editorial review, it is published on the affected article's footer with both positions and primary sources. This is closer to a Wikipedia talk page than to a unilateral editorial verdict.
5. Auditable trail: the disagreement and its resolution appear in /wiki/changelog tagged disagreement so any third party can verify both the process and the outcome.

7.3 · Editorial independence statement

Policy Window's editorial decisions are made independently of any funder preference, commercial incentive, government interest, or partisan position. Specifically:

• No funder has veto power over article content. Past, current, and future funders are listed on /wiki/funding; if any funder requests editorial influence, the request is logged on the funding page and the contract is reviewed for termination.
• No commercial customer has cell-modification rights. §4 above defines the commercial-editorial firewall. Customer requests for catalog changes are evaluated by the disagreement-resolution procedure (§7.2), not as a commercial term.
• No government, party, or movement has standing preference. The catalog covers binding regulation (EU AIA, China measures), voluntary codes (G7, OECD), frontier-lab voluntary frameworks (Anthropic RSP, OpenAI Preparedness, DeepMind FSF, Meta Frontier), and civil- society work without privileging any sector.
• Editor identity + COI is disclosed. The /wiki/editorial-board page names every editor with their COI; the board is currently in formation (1 of 6 slots filled) and this is disclosed prominently.
• If we fail this commitment, point at it. File a disagreement under §7.2 citing "editorial independence violation" and we'll respond.

7.4 · No legal advice

Policy Window outputs (catalog rows, coverage cells, comparative analyses, evidence packs, research-module deliverables) are evidence references, not legal counsel. The catalog is a structured-lookup layer pointing at primary regulatory texts; jurisdictional interpretation, regulatory-strategy guidance, and compliance opinions require qualified counsel. Customer-facing outputs ship with this disclaimer; we will not provide informal legal-advice statements via email or in scoped engagements even when asked.

7.5 · No automated influence at scale (revised 2026-06-03)

Bulk regulatory comments, synthetic public-consultation submissions, and astroturf campaigns remain prohibited at any scale — for any client, on any topic, at any price. With §7.1 now permitting PW's own evidence-based advocacy, per-published-advocacy-output review is mandatory: each policy brief, regulatory submission, or testimony evidence pack is reviewed and signed by a named editor before publication, and the cap is one position-piece per editorial cycle (calendar quarter) per topic — no batch generation. The AGI Social Scientist research engine (§4 of /wiki/ai-disclosure) remains explicitly gated against being used as an influence-content factory.

7.6 · No covert persuasion or political microtargeting

Policy Window does not deploy AI for influence operations. All editorial output is signed (by the editorial board for catalog content; by the expert validation bench for research-module content) and dated. No anonymous content, no per-audience-tailored persuasion, no political microtargeting, no covert-influence operations. This subsumes the existing §7 microtargeting bright line and clarifies that it applies to every product layer (free catalog, paid exports, paid research modules).

7.7 · No unapproved human-subject research

The on-demand expert validation bench (see /wiki/services) conducts expert and stakeholder interviews when a customer engagement requires it. Every such interview requires: (1) informed consent in writing from each participant, (2) declared data retention (default: structured summary retained; raw recordings deleted after the validation cycle), (3) anonymisation by default (named attribution only with explicit per-instance consent), (4) a written protocol shared with the participant before the interview, and (5) a named expert researcher accountable for the protocol. No covert observational research; no human-subject work without an approved protocol; no synthetic-respondent substitution.

7.8 · Influence-tracking obligation (new 2026-06-03)

Where Policy Window publishes a position or contributes to a regulatory submission — or any other §7.1 advocacy artefact (analytical position, policy recommendation, regulatory-submission contribution, hearing-testimony evidence pack, amicus evidence appendix) — the contribution is logged at /wiki/influence-tracker within 7 days of publication or filing, with: the cited cells, the named editor, the receiving venue, the date, and a permanent ?asOf= URL. An advocacy output that ships without its §7.8 log entry is a charter breach, published per the §4.5 breach-disclosure rule. Influence is verifiable and countable, not aspirational.

7.9 · AI-assisted drafting, human-accountable publication (adopted 2026-06-13)

This replaces the former absolute prohibition on LLM-generated article prose. Article prose MAY be drafted with LLM assistance — up to and including a full machine-generated first draft — where all of the following hold. Undisclosed AI drafting remains a charter breach.

• (a) Named-editor review. A named editor reviews the complete text against the cited primary sources before publication and approves it, taking the same per-output accountability the charter assigns for human-authored prose. The approving editor is recorded by name on the article.
• (b) Provenance disclosure.Every article carries a human-visible and machine-readable drafting-provenance disclosure (drafting mode + approving editor), extending the existing "✦ AI" labeling idiom from literature findings to article prose. See each article's footer and the drafting-provenance criterion at /wiki/editorial-standards.
• (c) Citation integrity unchanged. Every factual claim keeps its primary-source citation. The citation-integrity gate applies to AI-drafted prose identically; a claim that cannot be anchored to a cited source does not publish.
• (d) No auto-publication — unchanged by §7.9. Under §7.9, nothing publishes to a public surface without audited human approval; §7.9 changes who may produce a first draft, not who decides publication. (This was subsequently relaxed for the wiki prose tiers only by §7.10, adopted one day later — see below.)
• (e) Substantive-review attestation. The approving editor attests to having verified the citations and the load-bearing claims — an attestation, not a formality sign-off. The §7.2 dissent procedure applies to AI-drafted prose exactly as to human-authored prose.

7.10 · Autonomous AI authorship + publication of wiki prose (adopted 2026-06-13)

A further relaxation of §7.9, for ONE scope only: the prose tiers (abstract / explainer) on the four wiki article templates. Within that scope, prose MAY be drafted by an LLM, reviewed by an automated adversarial reviewer, and published without human review— removing the named-human-editor checkpoint §7.9 requires. It applies to nothing else: not catalog data, not coverage classifications, not other surfaces, not the dashboard. Autonomous publication is permitted only whenall of the following hold:

• (a) Citation-integrity gate (unchanged).Every claim must trace to the article's already-cited primary sources; prose introducing an unanchored claim is rejected and does not publish.
• (b) Adversarial automated review. A separate reviewer agent, instructed to refute, checks each draft for citation-faithfulness, absence of new claims, and quality; only passes publish, and every rejection is logged.
• (c) Conspicuous provenance.Every autonomously-published piece is labeled, prominently, "AI-authored and AI-reviewed — published without human editorial review (§7.10)", so no reader mistakes it for human-reviewed content.
• (d) Reversibility + kill-switch. Autonomous publication is logged and revertible, and a single switch disables the pipeline.
• (e) §7.2 dissent applies, and the scope above is a hard limit.

7.11 · Autonomous AI curation of catalog data (adopted 2026-06-15)

A further relaxation, for the catalog DATA layer this time (§7.10 covered only prose). Within this scope, AI MAY add new instruments, classify their coverage (governs / implicit / silent / conflicts), and extend the regulatory chronology — with primary-source citations and without prior human review, relaxing the standing rule that the founding editor reviews every catalog row before it ships. It is strictly additive: it does NOT permit AI to delete, reclassify, or overwrite a human-curated row, nor to change a classification a human set. Autonomous curation is permitted only when all of the following hold:

• (a) Primary-source citation gate (unchanged). Every AI-curated instrument and every coverage classification must trace to a primary source (regulator publication, statute, court order); a row or cell lacking one does not publish. Mechanically enforced by a pin.
• (b) Adversarial classification review.A separate reviewer agent, instructed to refute, checks each AI-curated instrument's coverage classifications against the cited primary sources for accuracy and non-overclaim; only passes publish, and every rejection is logged.
• (c) Conspicuous provenance + lower confidence.Every AI-curated row is labelled "AI-curated (§7.11)" on its article and in the machine-readable data, and its classifications carry a reduced default confidence until a human editor confirms them — so no reader mistakes AI-curated data for human-reviewed catalog content.
• (d) Reversibility + kill-switch. AI-curated rows are logged and revertible, and a single switch removes all of them from public surfaces at once.
• (e) §7.2 dissent applies, and the scope is a hard limit: additions-with-citations only. The named editor may correct or remove any AI-curated row at any time, and a row converts to human-reviewed once the editor confirms it.

7.12 · AGI Social Scientist as the primary catalog author (adopted 2026-06-16)

The deepest relaxation in this charter. Building on §7.11 (strictly-additive AI curation), §7.12 makes the AGI Social Scientist the primary engine that authors catalog content — instruments, topics, concepts, benchmarks, their coverage classifications, and prose — and authorizes the eventual retirement of the human authoring paths(manual catalog editing, the topic proposer, and the §7.9 human-review prose path) once the engine is wired and proven. It lifts §7.11's additions-only limit: AI MAY now revise and re-author catalog rows, not only add them, and may override a human classification it cannot reproduce. Permitted only when all of the following hold:

• (a) Primary-source citation gate (unchanged). Every authored row and classification traces to a primary source; mechanically pin-enforced.
• (b) Provision-supports-classification gate. A pin verifies the cited provision SUPPORTS the assigned verdict — not merely that a citation exists — because a misclassification otherwise passes every prior gate into a source others permanently cite.
• (c) Independent adversarial review. A separate refute-by-default reviewer checks every classification against its cited source for accuracy and non-overclaim; only passes publish; every rejection is logged.
• (d) Conspicuous provenance + reduced confidence.Every engine-authored row is labelled "AI-authored (§7.12)" on its article and in the machine-readable data, at reduced default confidence until a named editor confirms it.
• (e) Reversibility + freeze-to-snapshot kill-switch. A single switch withdraws all engine-authored content from public surfaces without reverting data; because the engine may author the whole catalog, the switch freezes to the last human-confirmed snapshot rather than blanking, and a correction path exists that does not depend on any retired authoring tool.
• (f) Sequencing — no self-inflicted outage. The human authoring paths are retired LAST, only after the engine is wired as the catalog author and has authored a coverage cycle that survives review and every pin. The catalog is never left un-authorable mid-migration.
• (g) §7.2 dissent applies. The named editor may override, correct, or remove any engine-authored row at any time.

7.13 · Autonomous authorship of non-instrument PROSE articles (adopted 2026-06-18)

§7.12 authorizes the engine to author all catalog content, concepts and prose included. §7.13 specifies the SAFEGUARDS for the prose-synthesis case — authoring a whole non-instrument article (a concept, or a synthesis tier on any article) without prior human review. The §7.12(b) provision-supports gate cannot apply here: a synthesis has no single operative provision to quote, so its truth is defeasible, not determinate. The prose-specific safeguards, all of which must hold:

• (a) Grounding gate. Every load-bearing structured claim is catalog-true and the article carries a density-floored, anchored grounding-claim set — no ungrounded autonomous prose; pin-enforced (the §7.12(b) analogue for prose).
• (b) Adversarial synthesis review. A refute-by-default panel of ≥4 distinct lenses — faithfulness, balance/neutrality, completeness (a scoping-review gap check), and no-fabrication — clears it; a single substantiated refusal holds it.
• (c) Lower-epistemic-tier disclosure. AI-authored prose is labelled, and surfaced on /wiki/ai-curation, as a LOWER tier than a verbatim-gated instrument cell — defeasible synthesis, not a determinate quote.
• (d) Kill-switch. The existing §7.10 PW_AUTONOMOUS_PROSE_DISABLED switch withdraws all autonomously-published prose from public surfaces.
• (e) §7.2 dissent applies. Any named editor may correct or retract any AI-authored article at any time.

8 · How this charter can be amended

The charter is a public commitment, not internal policy. Amendments require: (a) a public PR against this file with rationale, (b) a minimum 14-day review window once the editorial board has ≥3 named editors, (c) a changelog entry naming what changed and why. Until the editorial board reaches ≥3 editors, amendments require a public PR + 14-day window + explicit acknowledgement that no independent review is yet possible.