Group submission guidelines

How CLCI Hub decides what to research, what to publish, what to hold, and what to reject. These guidelines apply to user submissions and to internal editorial decisions equally.

Source thresholds

A candidate becomes a published group profile only if the public-source base meets one of the following paths, weighted against the source hierarchy:

High-confidence path

• Court records, regulator records, or government investigations.
• Peer-reviewed academic work.
• Major investigative journalism.
• Multiple corroborated ex-member accounts.
• Official group documents confirming control practices.

Medium-confidence path

• Reputable journalism from established outlets.
• Books from credible publishers.
• Named ex-member testimony.
• Credible NGO reports.
• Multiple independent public accounts.

Low-confidence path

• Scattered public reports.
• Forum / testimony material.
• Limited journalism.
• Enough material to describe concerns carefully, but not enough for strong claims. Profile will carry a Low confidence rating.

Reject or watchlist

A submission will not be promoted to a profile if:

• The only support is rumour, social-media gossip, or unverifiable testimony.
• The submission targets a private individual rather than a group or movement.
• The submission is essentially a defamation risk without source backing.
• The entity is not actually a group / community / system in the sense the catalogue covers.
• The submission is about an ordinary mainstream group with no documented high-control pattern.

What every published profile must include

• Name, slug, aliases, category, subcategory, regions, countries.
• Active status and entity type.
• CLCI score with explicit BITE breakdown.
• Signed modifier with a recorded reason.
• Confidence rating (High / Medium / Low).
• Source list and (where populated) structured sources with reliability tier.
• Top documented patterns and their public-source basis.
• Timeline of public-record events where relevant.
• Recovery / resources cross-links.
• Correction and right-of-reply links.
• Last reviewed date.
• Disclaimer covering ordinary members and the limits of public-source evidence.

Editorial framing rules

• Allegations are framed as "reported", "alleged", "according to", "public-source indicators", "documented by", with explicit attribution.
• Where the organisation has issued a public response, the response is acknowledged.
• Ordinary members are not described as accused or culpable.
• CLCI scores are explicitly framed as editorial measures, not legal findings.
• Living individuals are handled per /methodology/living-persons.
• Sub-branches are kept distinct from broader traditions per /methodology/religious-neutrality.
• Political/ideological groups are handled per /methodology/political-neutrality.

Submit

/submit-group — structured submission. /submit-source — add a public source to an existing entry or candidate. /report-issue — report a factual error, broken link, duplicate, or outdated score.