Editorial policy

Formats

Articles are labelled by format: practical articles explain how something is done and what to check; analysis examines how the industry works; news, project, interview and opinion pieces are labelled as such on the article. Opinion is signed and never presented as reporting.

Sources and evidence

When an article relies on a document, standard, report or dataset, it lists it under Sources at the end, with the publisher and date where known. Numbers, prices and technical limits are tied to a named source in the sentence where they appear; where no reliable source exists the article gives a reasoned range or leaves the number out. Local prices are only quoted with their date, place, currency and unit.

Articles built on general engineering practice may carry no source list. Treat their figures as indicative, and check them against your own site, supplier and municipal engineer before spending money.

A news report covers a documented project, contract or event from one named public source: an agency, operator, funder, implementer or news report. Each one names that source and its date in the first sentence, links it, and ends by saying what the source does not establish. An announcement, agreement, scope or target is reported as exactly that, never as a finished work, and the source's date is the as-of date: a report does not describe the present condition of a road, port, market or water system.

Checks before publication

Every article is checked against the house rules before it is published: a direct answer to its title, plain English, no prices, fees, statistics or populations without a named source, no invented studies, reports or links, technical limits given as general practice with the instruction to confirm them against the project’s specification, and claims about a town’s ground, water, market or people stated as things to check rather than as facts. An article that fails a check is revised, and a passage that still fails after revision is removed before the article appears.

No article is reviewed by an engineer. Where an article carries a note naming a reviewer and their role, that review happened; where it carries none, it did not. Every article is published as general guidance, not as engineering advice for any particular site: confirm the details for your own plot with a qualified person before you commit money.

The editorial desk audited the articles published before this policy took effect and corrected or qualified the passages that could not be supported. Remaining passages that need expert confirmation are marked as general practice in the text.

Places

Every article names the town or region it is written for, and the site labels local reporting as such. Conditions in Hargeisa are not conditions in Berbera or Bosaso: ground, water, salt, prices and rules all differ. We do not present a finding about one place as a rule for every place.

How place pages are built

A town’s page on Places gathers two things and says which is which: the articles tagged with the town, and the open tenders and jobs on the board whose notice names the town as the place of the work. Nothing on it is written for the page by hand. Its opening summary and its At a glance box are filled in by a fixed template from the page’s own numbers: how many articles and of which kind, how many open tenders and jobs, the newest and soonest dates, where the entries were seen, and when the page last changed. A line with no value behind it is left out rather than estimated.

A town’s page asks search engines to index it only while it carries more than two articles, the same line the tag archives draw. A town the board alone covers still has a page for readers, but it is not offered for indexing: the board’s own page for the town is where that work is listed. Figures are counted when the page is built, and a page is rebuilt on its first visit after an hour has passed, so a count can trail the board by an hour or a little more.

How the board lists tenders and jobs

The board lists open tenders and jobs in construction and the built environment, information technology and consultancy, and every job in Somalia from one jobs board it carries in full, for work in Somalia: Somaliland, Puntland and the federal member states. A role based abroad is listed only when its notice says in so many words that people based in Somalia may apply. Notices come from four kinds of source, and each entry says which: the issuing body’s own channel, a database where the issuing organisation posts its own notices, a listings board that republishes other people’s notices, and notices sent in by readers.

Before an entry is listed, its place is read from the notice and a notice for work outside Somalia is refused; a notice that closed before the board saw it is refused; a notice carried by several sources becomes one entry that names each of them; and a notice from a listings board or a reader is listed only after its original link has answered and the desk has read it. Each entry is scored on its evidence, such as a stated issuer, a stated closing date, a named place and a second source, and an entry that scores too low waits rather than being listed. The summary on an entry is written by the desk in its own words, never copied from the notice, and the notice itself governs. Most entries link it; an entry from the board carried in full is written up completely in the desk’s own words instead, with the employer’s own way to apply.

An entry comes off the board once its closing date has passed, or 45 days after it was posted when the notice states no date. Its page keeps answering, marked closed, so an older link still explains itself.

What these pages do not claim

• The board lists what its sources carry. It is not a register of every tender or vacancy in the country, and a source that stops publishing leaves a gap.
• A count on a place page or a board page is a count of what that page lists, not of the construction activity in a town.
• The Data Hub’s price and wage series are not published yet, and no page quotes a price or a wage from them.

Dates

Each article shows the year it was published, and the exact date is carried in the page’s machine-readable data, in the RSS feed and in the Markdown copy of the article. When the substance of an article changes in a later year, the article also shows that year. Cosmetic edits, tag changes and republishing change neither.

Corrections

If you find an error, use the Report an error link at the end of the article, or the contact page. Tell us the article, the passage and, if you can, the source that shows what is right. We check the claim, correct the article and date the correction. We do not remove articles to hide a mistake.

Independence

Somali Construction Review carries no advertising and no sponsored articles. It does not sell construction services, and it does not name a contractor, supplier or engineer as recommended unless the article explains why.