Editorial standards
How this guidance is written.
121 technical articles, 29 source documents and a library of calculators — written under rules strict enough that a metrologist can check them. This page is those rules, so you can judge the guidance before you rely on it.
Primary sources, named in the article
Every article ends with the documents it was written against — the standard, the guideline or the metrology guide, by name and edition where the edition matters. Nothing is written from a secondary summary or from another website's explanation of a clause. If a claim cannot be traced to a document in the references list, it does not go in.
Numbers come from tested code, not from prose
Every worked example, table and calculator result on this site is produced by the same calculation library the platform uses, with unit tests against published reference values — the IEC 60751 resistance table, GUM Table G.2, the ILAC-G8 risk figures, ICH mean kinetic temperature and the Magnus dew-point relation. Numbers are never typed out from memory or generated as text.
Answer first, then the reasoning
Each article opens with the answer, states the key takeaways, and only then works through the detail. A reader who needs one number should not have to read nine paragraphs to find it, and a reader who needs the derivation should not have to look elsewhere for it.
The limits are stated, not implied
Guidance says where it stops. Calculators list their assumptions and what they do not model. Articles distinguish what a standard requires from what is common practice, and from what is one defensible option among several. Where a judgement is genuinely contested, the article says so rather than picking a side quietly.
No compliance verdicts
Nothing here tells you that you are compliant, accredited or validated. Those are determinations for an assessor, an auditor or a qualified reviewer in possession of your actual evidence. Articles explain what a clause asks for and how teams typically demonstrate it.
Demonstration data is labelled
Where the site shows a mapping study, a certificate or a report, it is built on clearly-labelled demonstration data. There are no anonymised-but-real client datasets, no invented case studies presented as client work, and no testimonials or logos that do not belong to a real, consenting customer.
Where AI is used, and where it is not
The articles are drafted with AI assistance against the cited sources and are edited before publication. They are not machine-generated at request time, and they are not spun variants of one another: each is written once, against its own sources, and changed in place when the underlying guidance changes.
The technical assistant at /ai is a different thing again: it retrieves passages from a rights-checked knowledge base and cites them, calls the deterministic calculation engine rather than doing arithmetic itself, and flags any answer that involved a calculation, a retry or a judgement about evidence for human review.
Neither the articles nor the assistant are a substitute for the standard itself, for your organisation's procedures, or for a qualified reviewer.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, it gets fixed rather than defended. Send the page and the claim through the contact form. Corrections are made in the article itself and its updated date moves; a correction that changes the sense of the guidance is noted in the article. The standards index lists every source the library is written against, and which articles cite each one.
Frequently asked questions
- Who writes these articles?
- They are produced by ValiTrac's editorial process against primary standards and metrology guides, with AI assistance in drafting and the numbers generated by tested calculation code. They carry an organisational byline rather than a personal one because that is what is accurate today — where an article is reviewed by a named specialist in future, the review will be named on the article.
- How current is the guidance?
- Each article shows the date it was last updated. Standards are cited by name and, where it matters, by edition. Where a document has been revised or withdrawn since an article was written, the correction route below is the fastest way to get it fixed.
- Can I reuse an article or a calculator?
- Quote and link freely — a link back to the source page is the only thing asked. The calculators run entirely in your browser and store nothing. The standards themselves are published by the organisations named in the references and are not distributed here.
- How do I report an error?
- Use the contact form and say which page and which claim. Technical corrections are the highest-priority queue on this site: a wrong number in metrology guidance is worse than no guidance, and a correction changes the article in place with its updated date.