Editorial Standards

Last reviewed 2026-08-15

These are the rules every page on Relics of War is held to. They apply equally to pages written by people and to pages the site assembles from data.

Accuracy over volume

A page exists because it is useful to a collector, not because a database could produce it. We would rather publish 500 pages that are right than 50,000 that are thin. Pages that do not have enough real inventory or enough recorded sales to be genuinely useful are either not created or are kept out of search-engine indexes until they earn their place.

No invented content

• We do not generate historical claims, provenance, rarity statements, or valuations by machine.
• We do not paraphrase or "spin" dealer descriptions to make pages look different from one another.
• We do not pad pages with filler paragraphs.
• Every price figure is computed from real, recorded sales and carries its sample size.

Where software helps organize or summarize, a person verifies factual historical claims before they are published. Editorial text on this site moves through explicit states — draft, review required, verified, published — and only verified or published text ever appears on a public page.

Sources

Historical statements should be traceable to reliable references: the Official Records, ordnance manuals, period catalogs and manufacturer records, museum collections, auction archives, and published reference works. We do not invent citations. Where a claim cannot be supported, it is omitted rather than hedged into print.

Sponsorship and independence

Dealer and auction-house listings appear on Relics of War because they are in the marketplace, not because anyone paid for placement. If paid placement is ever introduced it will be labeled plainly — Sponsored, Featured Dealer, Promoted Listing — and kept separate from organic ordering. Advertising never influences identification guidance or price-guide figures.

Corrections

We correct mistakes promptly and visibly. See the Corrections Policy.