Our sources: the fact ledger, and how to check us

One number, one row, one place

Every figure on this site lives in a single file — a fact ledger — as one row, and pages read from it. Nothing is typed twice. When a price changes, the row changes and every page using it re-dates itself.

That sounds like a filing decision. It is actually the whole product. It means there is exactly one answer to “where did this number come from”, it is the same answer on every page, and you can ask for it.

The numbers above are counted from the ledger itself when this page is built — not typed in by hand and not updated on a schedule. If a row is added or verified, they move on their own. How we price · Open questions

What a row contains

Every row carries the same eight things, and a row missing any of them is not publishable:

• The claim — what the number is a number of. Not “kite lesson: $300” but “beginner kitesurfing, 6 hours private tuition, Paje”.
• The value — as published at the source, in the currency actually charged.
• The entity — who is charging or stating it, named. Where a band spans several operators, each one and its own figure.
• The source — a URL, a document, or a described call.
• The method — how we know it. One of four, below.
• The date checked — the day a human confirmed it at the source. Not the day the page was written.
• Who checked it.
• The status and confidence — how much weight the row can bear.

Rows also carry the working notes: what we excluded and why, what a figure does not mean, and where a source contradicts itself. Those notes are often the most useful part, and the interesting ones surface on the page as caveats rather than being buried.

The four methods

Method is not a formality — it is how much the number is worth.

• site — read from the operator’s own published page. Checkable by you, right now.
• rate-sheet — from a published fixed rate card, which is stronger than a quoted range: it is a price the operator has committed to in public.
• phone — confirmed by call, with the date. Weaker, because you cannot re-read it; we say who said it and when.
• in-person — confirmed on the island.

We do not have a method called “an aggregator said so”, and figures that would need one do not become rows.

The four statuses

• verified — a human confirmed it at the source on the recorded date. Only these reach a published page as facts.
• needs-recheck — was verified, and something has changed or aged; treat as provisional.
• CA-VERIFY — needs a chartered accountant. Used for tax rules, where being approximately right is being wrong.
• unverified — a lead, or a deliberate gap we are recording rather than filling.

The last one is the one to understand. Some rows exist precisely to hold a question open — a fact we went looking for, could not confirm, and refuse to guess at. Those are listed in plain English on open questions. A ledger that contained only answers would be a ledger that had stopped looking.

What the publishing pipeline refuses to do

These are not policies we intend to follow. They are checks that run before anything reaches the site, and they stop the process:

• A page carrying an unconfirmed marker does not publish. Not “gets flagged” — does not publish.
• A page whose facts are not all verified, with real sources, does not go live. A row with a placeholder source fails this even if the prose looks finished.
• Two pages cannot target the same search phrase, so we cannot quietly write the same page twice.
• A legal quotation must actually appear in the ledger row it claims to come from. The build compares them and fails on a mismatch, so a quote cannot drift from its source through editing.

The last one exists because paraphrasing a statute is the easiest way to publish something false while feeling careful.

Where the sources actually are

We do not reprint the ledger here, on purpose: a table copied to a second place starts drifting the day after you write it, and a stale copy of a trust asset is worse than no copy. Each figure sits on the page that uses it, with its source and date in the sentence.

• Prices — the kite and dive price indices, airport transfers, Safari Blue, and weddings.
• Law and property — can foreigners buy property in Zanzibar, which quotes the instruments section by section.
• Coast, tides and conditions — the Paje and Nungwi area guides.
• Terms and what they actually mean — the glossary.

Facts expire

Our checks flag any row whose last confirmation is more than ninety days old, so staleness surfaces by itself instead of accumulating quietly. Note what that is and is not: it is an alarm that goes off, not a promise that every row is always fresh. When one is overdue, the honest thing is that the page says so.

When we re-check a row we append the new reading rather than overwriting the old one. The superseded value stays on the record with its date. This matters more than it sounds: a site that silently overwrites prices can never be shown to have been wrong, which conveniently also means it can never be shown to have been right.

The provenance chain

The ledger is version-controlled. Every change to every number is recorded with who made it, when, and the note explaining why — permanently, and not by us choosing to keep a log. If a price on this site changed, the change has a timestamp and an author, and neither can be quietly edited afterwards.

This is why we draft in files rather than typing into the website. It costs us a slower workflow and buys you the ability to audit us.

How to challenge a fact

If a number here is wrong, that is the most useful thing you can tell us, and you do not need to be polite about it.

The WhatsApp button on any page reaches a human. Tell us the page and what you were actually quoted. We will re-check it at the source. If you are right, the row changes, every page using it re-dates, and it appears on corrections — dated, permanent, and whether or not it flatters us.

We would rather be corrected in public than be trusted by default.