This page sets out how Midfield decides what to publish and what to do when we get it wrong. It applies to written coverage and to the match archive equally, because a wrong scorecard misleads a reader exactly as effectively as a wrong sentence does.
Sourcing
Match data is drawn from public and licensed sources rather than transcribed by hand. Cricket scorecards come primarily from Cricsheet's structured ball-by-ball records. Results, fixtures and live scores come from sports data providers. Tournament reference material such as squads, formats and honours comes from public encyclopaedic sources and official competition records.
Where two sources disagree about a match, we favour the one closer to the scoring itself: an official scorecard over a news report, a news report over an aggregator. Where the disagreement cannot be resolved, we publish the field as unknown rather than picking one at random.
Verification
Automated checks run continuously across the archive. They look for the failures that databases produce and humans do not notice: a match classified in the wrong format, a fixture marked finished with a date in the future, a team name that has slugged into two separate identities, a date that is not a real calendar date. Anything that fails a check is either fixed or held back from publication.
These checks catch structural problems. They cannot catch a plausible-looking wrong number, which is where readers come in.
Corrections
We correct errors as soon as we can confirm them. There is no waiting period and no threshold of importance below which a mistake is left standing. A misspelled player name in a 1997 scorecard is worth fixing, because somebody looking for that scorecard will not find it otherwise.
To report something, use the contact page. It helps enormously if you include the address of the page and what specifically is wrong. If you can point to a source, that turns a report into a fix.
Substantive corrections to written coverage are noted on the article rather than made silently. Routine fixes to archive data, such as a spelling, a venue or a margin, are made in place, because a note on every one of them would bury the record it is meant to clarify.
Written coverage
Reporting is attributed to a named writer. Analysis and opinion are labelled as such and are not presented as reporting. Quotations are reproduced as given; where a quote has been shortened, the omission is marked.
We do not publish unverified transfer rumours, injury speculation sourced to nobody, or coverage assembled from another outlet's reporting without saying so. If a story originated elsewhere, we say where, and we link to it.
Advertising and independence
Midfield carries advertising. Advertisers have no say in what we cover, how we cover it, or where a page ranks in any listing on the site. Advertising is visually distinct from editorial content and labelled where its nature is not obvious.
No club, league, governing body, agent, sponsor or betting operator has any editorial input. We do not accept payment for coverage, for links within coverage, or for the removal of coverage. Where a commercial relationship exists that a reader might reasonably want to know about, it is disclosed on the page it affects.
The commercial terms are on the advertising page, and they say the same thing.
Artificial intelligence
Automated tools are used in the production of this site: for classifying matches, generating structured summaries from scorecards, and building the reference pages that sit on top of the archive. Anything produced that way is checked before it is published, and the underlying data is sourced as described above.
Reporting, analysis and opinion are written by people.