How we check

Every guide here carries a date. This page explains what that date is promising, and — just as importantly — what it is not.

The date means somebody opened the page that day

A verification date is not the date the article was written, and not the year printed in the title. It is the day the prices, times and rules in the body were read off the source that decides them: an operator's timetable, a ministry notice, a city government fare table.

Anything older than its stamp has not been re-checked since. That is the honest position, and it is more than almost any English guide to Korea will tell you.

Korean sources first, in Korean

Korean transport operators, ministries and city governments publish everything in Korean, often weeks before an English version exists, and sometimes with no English version at all. English content farms do not read those pages. That gap is the whole reason this site exists.

So the rule is: find the body that actually sets the number, read its own Korean page, and cite it. Sources in Korean are marked KO in the list at the foot of every article, so you can see how much of a page rests on primary material.

Facts get extracted and rewritten in plain English. Articles are never translations of Korean pages, and never reproduce their text.

What the software refuses to publish

Editorial standards that live only in someone's head get skipped on a busy day. These ones are enforced by the build: if an article breaks them, the site does not compile and there is nothing to upload.

• No article may have an empty source list.
• No article may be missing a verification date or a summary block.
• A verification date in the future is rejected outright. You cannot have checked something tomorrow.
• A verification date more than a week older than the publication date is rejected. A stamp that sat in a drawer is not a check.
• Publication dates cannot be set ahead, so a run of articles cannot be back-filled to fake a schedule.

Unverified means unverified

Sometimes the primary source cannot be found, is behind a login, or contradicts itself. When that happens the number is labelled as unverified in the text, and most articles end with a short section listing exactly what has not been confirmed yet.

Copying a figure from another English site and presenting it as checked would be the one thing that makes this whole project pointless, so it does not happen. An admitted gap is the cost of the stamp meaning anything.

Photographs are not evidence

Photos here set a scene. They are not offered as proof of anything in the text, and every caption says what the picture actually shows — including when it was taken somewhere other than the place under discussion.

Corrections

Fares change, last trains move, and rules arrive with a month's notice. When something here turns out to be wrong or out of date, it gets fixed and the verification date is reset to the day of the re-check, so a corrected page cannot hide behind an old stamp.

If you have hit something that does not match reality — especially if you were standing at the counter at the time — please write: contact@koreaverified.com. Details of where and when help more than anything else.

Who writes it, and what writes it

One person, Jayden Hwang, living in Incheon, a few minutes from the airport most visitors arrive at. There is no newsroom here and no pretence of one.

There is also a program. Drafting is automated: once a day it takes the next question off a list, goes and reads the primary sources, and writes a draft. Then it has to get past everything described further up this page. Nothing reaches the site by being written; it reaches the site by surviving the checks, and on a day when it cannot, the queue simply does not move.

Saying so costs nothing, and the alternative is worse. A site whose entire claim is that it tells you what it has not verified cannot begin by being vague about how it is made. What the automation does not decide: which questions are worth answering, whether a source was misread, and whether a notice that is still online is still true. Those are read by a person, and the corrections address below reaches that person.

See About for the longer version, and Privacy for what the site does and does not collect.