How Lake Erie Gazetteer is made

How we write

Pages are researched and written with AI assistance from the public sources cited on each page. Every fact links to its source. Send corrections through the form.

All prose is our own. We quote sources only briefly, with credit, and we check every page against the cached text of its sources so that no passage is copied.

Where the facts come from

Each lighthouse and wreck has at least two sources, independent where we could find them. Each number is tied to one source in a single registry, so it reads the same everywhere. When good sources disagree, we show both and say which says what.

Verification dates

Every page shows when we checked it. Access details for lighthouses, like whether tower climbs are offered, carry their own "last verified" month.

How pages age

We don't pretend old information is current. Access details older than 12 months get an amber "check before you go" note; after 24 months they are marked unverified. Light characteristics older than 24 months link to the current Light List. A sentence about a name proposal fades after a year. Links that fail three weekly checks switch to an archived copy.

Positions

Lighthouse positions are landmarks and are shown in full. Wreck positions appear only when a reusable public source gives one, rounded to two decimal places (about 1 km). Protected and Ontario sites, and sites whose location is withheld, show only the general area. We never use positions from commercial books, paid databases or forums.

Numbers we compute

A few figures are our own arithmetic on public data, such as the monthly water-temperature averages (from NOAA's daily lake-wide values, 1995–2025), the ice-cover statistics (NOAA, 1973–2026), unit conversions, and counts of the records in this gazetteer. These are labeled as computed.

Corrections

If something is wrong, use the corrections form with a source if you can. Corrections are applied when the site is next updated; they are not published and we can't reply individually.

Images

Photos and drawings come from Wikimedia Commons under public-domain or Creative Commons licences, credited on each page and on the credits page.

Link checks

A program checks every source and operator link about once a week and identifies itself as "LakeErieGazetteer-LinkCheck/1.0". It reads only the first part of each page and stores nothing but the answer code.