Sources & verification

Most of what World Literacy teaches is stable: where a country is, what happened in 1945, what a central bank does. A minority of it churns — warhead counts, military budgets, chip market shares, the dollar's share of reserves — and a card that quietly goes out of date is worse than no card at all. This page is the standard that keeps those figures honest.

Every churning figure on a card is registered with the primary source it was checked against, the exact edition of that source, the month it was verified, and a re-verification cadence. Each figure is checked again when its cadence runs out. The registry also records every place a figure is echoed — a Threads card that reuses a Geopolitics number, for instance — so one correction reaches all of them. And the build enforces it: every registered figure must still appear, word for word, on the card that carries it. If a card's text drifts from the registry, or the registry is updated without the card, the build fails until the two agree.

Two kinds of figure are deliberately outside the registry. Self-updating ones — the Global Trends indicators and the country populations — are pulled live from the World Bank whenever the decks are rebuilt, so there is nothing to re-check by hand. And stable historical facts are left unregistered on purpose: they do not churn. Both are listed at the end of the page.