Editorial standards

Timeless Ticks publishes reference material about an expensive product category. That combination attracts money, and money bends editorial. These standards exist so that a reader can check whether we have kept our word, and so that we can point at something when we say no.

1. Sourcing

Primary before secondary. Where a published standard, patent, specification sheet, service manual or manufacturer technical document exists, we use it. A blog summarizing a standard is not a source for that standard.

Every number is traceable. If we print a tolerance, a pressure rating, a hardness value, a frequency, a half-life or a date, we can say where it came from. A figure whose origin we cannot establish does not get published, however often it appears elsewhere.

Sources are named on the page. Each guide ends with the references that support it. We name books, standards by number, organizations and manufacturer documentation. We do not pad the list with links that support nothing.

We do not invent. No invented studies, no invented quotes, no invented prices, no invented URLs, no invented experts. If we have not tested something ourselves, we do not imply that we have.

2. Accuracy and uncertainty

We would rather be usefully vague than confidently wrong. Where a figure varies by movement, by manufacturer or by year, we say "typically" and give the range. Where the historical record is disputed, we say it is disputed and give the competing accounts. Where a claim is common but unsupported, we name it as a common belief and explain what is actually known.

We distinguish, in the text, between:

• what a standard requires (a testable fact),
• what a manufacturer claims (a fact about the claim, not the watch),
• what is commonly found in practice (a general pattern, written as one),
• and what we think (opinion, written in the first person so you can see it coming).

Units are stated the way the industry publishes them, with a conversion alongside. This is an international publication, so measurements are metric first: case diameter, thickness, lug width, lug-to-lug and wrist circumference in millimeters, with the inch figure in parentheses where a reader is likely to be working in inches. Temperatures are in Celsius with Fahrenheit in parentheses, distances in kilometers with miles in parentheses. Prices are given as approximate ranges in US dollars, quoted the way US retail quotes them, which is before sales tax, since sales tax varies by state. Every price carries a note that it is indicative, that it moves with discounting and availability, and that a reader outside the US should expect a different local list once tax, import duty and distribution are counted. Where a standard is written in a particular unit, we quote the standard's own figure and add the equivalent rather than silently converting it.

That distinction lives in the wording rather than in a set of labels, so the test of whether we have kept to it is whether a sentence can be read as a fact when it is really a view. If you find one that can, that is worth a correction.

3. Fact checking

Every guide and glossary entry is drafted by the editorial desk and checked by Standards Review, whose remit is narrow and adversarial: check each figure against the source it claims, and reject anything that cannot be traced. Checking is a separate pass from drafting, and the person who checks a page is not the person who is trying to defend the sentence. A page that has been through this carries a "Fact checked" marker in its byline. A page without that marker has not been through it, and you can tell at a glance.

Nothing publishes on a machine's say-so. A named editorial function signs a page off, that function is accountable for it afterwards, and the desks are described on the authors page rather than dressed up as a masthead of invented specialists.

Two things that marker does not mean. It does not mean a laboratory verified anything, because we do not run one, and how we research says exactly what we do and do not test. And it does not apply to policy and legal pages such as this one: those carry a date but no byline badge, because they state what we undertake to do rather than facts about watches, and the thing to hold us to on them is our conduct.

4. Review cycles

Reference material rots. Every page shows its last review date, and every page is on a cycle:

A review means someone re-reads the page against its sources. If nothing changes, we still update the review date, because "we checked and it still holds" is information.

Why every page currently shows the same date. At the time of writing, every guide and glossary entry here carries the same review date. That is worth explaining, because a library of identical dates is normally the fingerprint of a bulk stamp applied for appearances. The reason is simply that the site launched as a whole: the entire library was checked in one pass before anything went live, so one date is the truthful answer for all of it. As the cycles above start to bite, those dates will diverge. If you come back in a year and still find every page sharing a single date, that would be evidence the cycle had stopped, and it would be worth writing to us about.

5. Corrections

We correct in public. The full process, including what counts as a correction versus a clarification versus a silent typo fix, is on the corrections page. The short version: substantive errors get a dated entry in a public log, and the page itself says it was corrected. We do not quietly edit and pretend.

The undertaking that goes with that: every reported error is read, we aim to answer within a few working days, a claim we cannot immediately settle is marked on the page while we settle it, and where we were wrong we say so in the words "this was wrong" rather than in the words "this has been updated". If a correction changes the answer a reader came for, it goes at the top of the page rather than in a footnote.

6. Independence and conflicts of interest

• No member of the desk accepts payment, loans, review units, hospitality, discounts or gifts from watch brands, dealers, marketplaces, auction houses or repairers.
• No brand, retailer or other third party sees a page before publication, or has any right of review, approval or veto. There is no mechanism by which one could ask.
• We do not accept guest posts, outside submissions, or "content partnerships", and no third party can have text placed on this site. Every such request is declined without exception.
• We hold no commercial relationship with any brand, retailer or marketplace we write about, and we earn nothing from a reader deciding to buy anything.
• Nobody on the desk trades watches commercially, and nobody holds a financial position that would gain from a brand's prices moving either way. Personal ownership of a watch is disclosed on any page where it could reasonably be read as an interest.
• Where an interest cannot be avoided, the page says so in the text rather than in a policy nobody reads.

If any of this ever changes, it will change on the ownership and funding page first, and prominently.

7. Nothing here is for sale

Coverage cannot be bought on this site, in any form and at any price. No brand, retailer, marketplace or agency has a commercial route onto these pages, because there is no commercial relationship for one to travel along. The site is paid for by its publisher, and the whole funding picture is on the ownership and funding page.

Having no money at stake in a conclusion is a stronger guarantee than any separation policy, so we would rather state the position plainly than write rules about keeping commercial interests at arm's length:

• Nobody can buy coverage. Not a mention, not a link, not a kind adjective, not a place in a comparison, not the removal of a sentence. No brand has ever paid for a word on this site.
• There is no commercial pressure on a conclusion, because there is no commercial relationship. A page that says a product category is not worth the money costs us nothing.
• Nothing on the page is promotional. Every sentence was written to answer a reader's question, so there is no second category of material here that a reader has to learn to tell apart from the writing.
• No third-party code runs on these pages either, which is why there is no tracking and no consent banner. See the privacy policy and the cookies page.
• If this ever changes, it changes on the ownership and funding page first, dated, and before it takes effect rather than after.

8. Use of AI tooling

We use large language models for research assembly, drafting and editing. We disclose this in the same terms on the about page and in how we research, because a disclosure that appears in only one place is a disclosure designed not to be found.

We disclose it rather than hiding it because the honest question is not whether a tool was used but whether the output is true.

The rules we apply:

• A model is never a source. Anything a model asserts is verified against a real document before it can appear on the page, or it is cut.
• Numbers, dates, standard clauses and named specifications are checked individually.
• Sources are checked to exist. A plausible-looking citation that we cannot verify is deleted rather than published.
• No page is presented as personal experience, hands-on testing or expert testimony that did not happen.
• Verification is a separate pass from drafting, and it ends with a person deciding the page is fit to publish. A model does not sign anything off.
• The desk is accountable for what is published regardless of how the draft was produced. "The tool wrote it" has never been an excuse and will not become one.

9. People-first writing

We write to answer the question, not to fill a page. That means: the direct answer near the top; no throat-clearing; no keyword padding; no artificially inflated word counts; no restating the question in three different ways to satisfy a search engine. If a subject can be settled in four hundred words, it gets four hundred words.

10. What we refuse to publish

• "Best of" lists assembled to move product rather than to answer a question.
• Investment advice, price predictions, or anything framing watches as an asset class.
• Instructions that would let a reader damage an expensive object without an explicit warning attached.
• Anything that helps someone pass off a counterfeit.
• Personal information about private individuals.
• Content produced to a brand's brief.

11. Complaints

If you think we have breached one of these standards, say so through the contact page and reference the standard by number. We will respond and, where we agree, we will log it publicly alongside our corrections.