CONTRIBUTING.md

# Contributing corrections and evidence

Contributions are welcome when they make the evidence easier to inspect or a conclusion more cautious. Identify the stable record ID, propose one atomic change, provide the strongest available source and state exactly which field or inference it changes.

Do not edit generated files in `data/`, `parquet/` or `release/` by hand. Change the declared source/seed layer, rebuild, and review the diff.

## Minimum submission

- Prefer an authoritative primary record plus independent corroboration.
- Add a stable locator—page, paragraph, timestamp, table or cell—when the source permits it. An unarchived URL alone is page-level provenance.
- Separate an underlying fact from an allegation, institutional assertion, interested-party measurement or researcher inference.
- Separate creator, sponsor, distributor, platform, beneficiary, attributed state actor and responding institution.
- Record denominator, unit, time window, uniqueness and method for every comparable quantity. Accounts, calls, completed calls, views, impressions, recipients and voters are not interchangeable.
- Do not infer belief, behaviour, turnout, votes, seats or winners from content volume, reach, institutional alarm or official results.
- Include relevant denials, counterevidence, acquittals, reversals and unresolved attribution.
- State the maximum warranted conclusion and what evidence would weaken or falsify the proposed agency-transfer interpretation.

Do not submit deceptive media, voter lists, targeting data, personal data, evasion guidance or operational playbooks.

## Promotion from `candidates`

A lead enters the claim-coded corpus only after it has a stable `case_id`, an explicit `record_type`, atomic claims, normalized evidence links, actor and technology provenance, a case–election relation, typed observations where warranted, an explicit pathway assessment, and a bounded conclusion. Preparedness, transparent use, null and boundary cases must remain visibly labelled; inclusion does not itself establish manipulation.

## Local checks

```bash
npm ci
npm run build:data
npm run build:audit
npm run build:parquet
npm run validate
npm run test:hardening
```

These commands perform internal structural and semantic QA. Passing them does not verify source truth, settle an allegation, establish representativeness or validate a causal claim. A release must have zero blocking errors; every remaining warning requires a written disposition.

## Release discipline

Before publishing a numbered release:

1. reconcile generated tables, Parquet, documentation, citation metadata and packaged artifacts;
2. record hashes for the files included in the release manifest;
3. create an immutable version tag and record its exact commit;
4. test public Viewer and download links anonymously;
5. update `CHANGELOG.md` without silently rewriting earlier versions.

The workbook requires the external `@oai/artifact-tool` runtime and is not part of the default public npm environment. Treat CSV and Parquet as the canonical analytic artifacts. A DOI may be added only for a frozen, reconciled deposit; the project currently has none.