Reference and Editorial Standards

This section documents how the site works: where club facts come from, what a verification date means, which sources are treated as authoritative, and what this directory refuses to publish.

It exists because a directory is only useful if you can tell the difference between something that was checked and something that was assumed.

The two layers#

Every club page on this site is built from two distinct layers.

Club records are facts about a specific organisation — address, contact details, sailing waters, boat classes, racing status, training programs, facilities, affiliation and social links. These come from the YouSail database and each carries a verification date.

Editorial content is everything else on this site: the guides, the taxonomy pages, the explanations of what a program or handicap system is, and the advice on how to compare clubs. This layer explains categories. It never asserts a fact about a named club.

The layers are kept technically separate so that editorial text can never silently become a claim about an organisation that nobody checked.

What the statuses mean#

Club facts use three states rather than two, because "we don't know" is different from "no".

Yes means the fact was confirmed from a club-controlled or official source on the recorded date.

No means the source positively indicated the absence of the feature, not that it was simply missing from a website.

Not verified means nobody has confirmed it either way. It is not a criticism of the club and it does not mean the feature is absent. Small volunteer clubs often run excellent programs that are documented nowhere a database can read.

What this site will not publish#

• Rankings of clubs as "best", "top" or "premier" without a published methodology and comparable verified data
• Aggregate ratings or review markup that was not genuinely collected
• Inferred facts — a club named "Yacht Club" is not evidence that it has a marina, a bar, or keelboat racing
• Membership fees, program schedules or contact details hard-coded into editorial pages, where they would go stale invisibly
• Local hazard claims about a specific waterway that were not sourced
• Australian Sailing branded program names applied to a club that has not been verified as offering them

Freshness#

Editorial pages carry a last-reviewed date. Time-sensitive material — racing rules cycles, safety categories, national program names and affiliation structures — is checked at least annually and whenever the governing body publishes a significant change.

Club records carry their own separate verification dates, because a guide reviewed this month tells you nothing about when a particular club was last checked.

Corrections#

If a club record is wrong or out of date, the fastest fix is for the club itself to correct the underlying source. Editorial errors — an incorrect explanation of a handicap system, an out-of-date program name, a broken pathway description — are corrections to this site and are fixed here.