Citation standards

How we choose sources, date figures, label estimates, disclose conflicts and correct mistakes.

Source hierarchy

We prefer the organisation that produced a number over anyone repeating it. In order of preference:

Official statistics: government statistics agencies, regulators and official registers.
Industry censuses and association statistics with a published method, such as the International Federation of Robotics.
Company filings to stock exchanges and securities regulators, then company results releases and announcements.
Peer-reviewed research and analyst publications that show their method.
Secondary press, only when the original is unavailable to us, always labelled as secondary and never rated high confidence.

What we will and won't publish

We publish a figure only if we have read it in the source ourselves, on the access date shown, and can link to that source.

We do not publish numbers we cannot trace to a source, figures from search-engine summaries or chatbots, or totals we cannot reproduce.
We do not publish our own forecasts, private analysis or estimates as statistics. Forecasts by others are labelled as forecasts and credited.
We do not publish demand statistics from our own search and request logs until the sample is large enough, and never anything that could identify a person.

How dates work

Every statistic carries four dates. The period is the time the number describes. The publication date is when the source published it. The access date is when we read it. The last-verified date is when we last re-checked that the source still says the same thing.

Live pages such as price lists and counters have no fixed publication date, so we cite the value as displayed on the access date and keep an archived copy where one can be made.

Estimates versus measured figures

Each statistic is labelled with how it was produced: official statistic, reported statistic, survey, company claim, list price, third-party estimate or third-party forecast. Supplier-sample statistics and survey results are labelled as such, with the caveats the producer gives.

Confidence levels

High: a primary source states the figure directly, and it is an official statistic, a published industry census or a regulatory filing.
Medium: a primary source states it, but it is a company claim, a list price, a survey, a sample-based statistic, an analyst estimate or a forecast.
Low: we could only check it in secondary reporting, or the producer marks it as preliminary or approximate.

Rounding and units

We keep figures exactly as the source states them, including rounding words such as almost, about and more than, and we always state the unit, currency and geography. We do not convert currencies in statistics.

Quotations and archives

Where the licence allows, we quote the exact passage the figure comes from, in its original language. We quote official statistics, filings and press releases, which are published for reproduction, and paraphrase commercial news articles. Each source links to an archived copy in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine where one exists or could be made.

Conflicts of interest

Whirrwork is free for buyers: no buyer fees and no pay-to-rank. Suppliers are listed for free. We run no ad trackers and we don't sell data.

If we ever charge for anything, it will be for optional supplier tools, and we will say so on this page and on every affected report. No company named in a statistic paid to be included or reviewed the statistic before publication.

Corrections policy

If we get something wrong, we fix the page, note the change on the page itself, and add an entry to the public corrections log with the date, what was wrong and what changed. The log is append-only: entries are never edited or deleted. Superseded figures stay visible in the log so anyone who cited them can see what changed.

Corrections log →

Re-verification cadence

An automated check confirms every source link still resolves. Any statistic not re-verified by a person for 180 days is flagged as stale on its page until it is checked again. Annual series are re-checked when the producer publishes a new edition.

What this policy is modelled on

These rules follow common newsroom and data-publisher practice: attribute every figure to its originator, prefer primary sources, separate reporting from estimation, date everything, and correct in public.

Licence and attribution

Text, statistics pages, charts and dataset releases are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Quoted passages remain the property of their publishers, and third-party figures should also be credited to their original source.

Attribution wording: Source: Whirrwork (https://whirrwork.com), CC BY 4.0

For a chart: Chart: Whirrwork (whirrwork.com), CC BY 4.0. Data: [original source]