How this works

Every fact carries its source. Every finding carries the question it set out to answer.

What this is for

Australia's public data has been published for years. It has not been organised. auscyclopedia uses it for two things: to seek what is actually the case, and to make the answer legible to anyone.

What we check before publish

Every page has to clear three questions for an ordinary reader: what does this mean, why does it matter, why should you care. Numbers without answers to those three are not worth shipping.

Pages also test the framing. Press releases pick the flattering number. A measure that affects one in three hundred investors is announced as helping seventy-five thousand home-buyers; a figure pulled up by high earners is labelled "average". We name the framing and show the raw figure beside it. Where the framing is honest, we credit the honest number.

Where the figures come from

Named public sources only. Government datasets, Bureau of Statistics, ATO, Hansard, court judgements, council resolutions, peer-reviewed research. The source for every claim is one click away.

For each question, the right source is the freshest and most granular one available. The Census is four years old. The ATO publishes per-postcode income two years after the income year ends. For a question about how much Australians earn by postcode, the ATO is the right source; the Census is not.

How AI fits in

auscyclopedia is written with AI. Drafts are produced by Claude (currently Opus 4.7), working from a fixed set of writing rules and editorial principles. Patrick Gallagher reviews and edits before publish.

AI gets things wrong. The offset is the best tools available, the best data we can assemble, and transparency: each finding will carry a "how this finding was built" note disclosing the model, the datasets, and any known limits. The first of those is on the NDIS savings finding; the others will follow.

If something is wrong

Tell us. Contact is the place. Upstream errors in agency records do not get silently corrected; they get displayed, sourced, and where useful shown next to a contradicting source on the same page.