OSINT-6 CHANGELOG 250814
Avoiding political advocacy doesn't guarantee that every reader will perceive a reference as neutral. Some people treat silence as opposition. Others treat the inclusion of an unwelcome fact as support for an adversary. A refusal to adopt either side's preferred language can be read as choosing the other side.
There's also a legitimate criticism behind some of that suspicion. Facts don't select, organize, and describe themselves. Editors decide which details are relevant, how much space each receives, which sources meet the standard, and where uncertainty must be stated. Claiming complete freedom from judgment would be dishonest.
Our answer is a controlled method, not a claim of perfect objectivity. The Factbook standard limits country information to material that establishes scale, authority, access, movement, communications, risk, and plausible operational conditions. Time-sensitive statements receive a research cutoff. Material claims require recoverable sources. Reported fact, disputed claim, incomplete information, and editorial assessment remain distinct.
Source treatment matters as much as source selection. A government document can establish what that government officially ordered or reported. It can't independently prove every premise in the document. A news report can record attributed statements and observed events, but its wording doesn't become OSINT-6 terminology by default. Conflicting accounts remain conflicting until stronger evidence resolves them.
This method won't satisfy readers who want public agreement with their position. That isn't its purpose. The aim is to make editorial decisions visible enough to examine and consistent enough to repeat across books.
Disagreement with a conclusion remains possible. A reader can challenge a date, source, classification, omission, or inference. That gives us a factual question we can investigate. A demand that we announce which side we're on asks for a different kind of publication, and we won't turn the Factbook line into one.