Elite Dangerous Field Manual:Source Quality Guide
How to judge and record source quality on EDFM — used to fill in {{Article status}}'s source_quality field, and to decide when a claim needs {{Unverified claim}}, {{Estimated information}}, or {{Community observation}} instead of being stated as plain fact.
Rough tiers (highest to lowest confidence)
- Direct, current, reproducible testing by the article's own author, on the stated game version/mode. State the version tested and the date.
- Official Frontier sources: in-game text, official patch notes, official forum posts from Frontier staff. Cite with
<ref>and a link. - Well-established community consensus, cross-confirmed by multiple independent, experienced sources, without a known Frontier statement either way. Use
{{Community observation}}if it hasn't been independently reproduced by this project. - Single-source community claim, not independently confirmed. Use
{{Unverified claim}}. Don't present tier-4 information as tier-1/2. - Estimated/approximate figures (e.g. "roughly," derived rather than measured). Use
{{Estimated information}}and say how the estimate was derived if possible.
Version sensitivity
Elite Dangerous changes over time, and Legacy has diverged from Live. A source being accurate once doesn't make it accurate now. {{Article status}}'s version and reviewed fields exist specifically so a reader can judge whether a claim might be stale — always fill them in rather than leaving the defaults.
What this project will not do
- Fabricate plausible-sounding numbers to fill a gap. An honestly marked gap is more useful than a confident-sounding guess.
- Treat a single unverified forum post as equivalent to a reproduced test.
- Import facts, images, or text from Fandom or other wikis, even with attribution — see Elite Dangerous Field Manual:Legal and Trademark Notice.