How this is made

A daily summary of the Edmonton public record: what Council and its committees decided and will decide, what got permitted and licensed, what the police and emergency services reported, what the courts released, the weather, and the scores. It is assembled automatically each morning from the 221 public sources we poll.

It is not a newsroom and does not pretend to be one. It does not do original reporting or interviews. For that, read Taproot Edmonton, CBC Edmonton and the city's other newsrooms.

What it does with their work is read it, summarise it in its own words, and link back to it. The summaries are written here rather than copied: a published sentence may not repeat more than 25 consecutive words from the piece it came from, which is the line between summarising something and reproducing it. Every item carries the link to what it read, so the original is one click away and the outlet keeps the reader.

Machine-written summaries can be fluent and wrong. Every sentence published here has to survive four checks before it appears.

1. It must quote its source. The writing model has to attach a span copied verbatim from the source document to every sentence. If that span is not genuinely in the source, the sentence is discarded automatically.

2. Its facts must match. Every number, dollar figure, date, time, vote tally, name and address in the sentence is extracted and checked against the cited passage. "$1.2 million" and "$1,200,000" are treated as the same fact; "$1.3 million" is not.

3. A second model tries to refute it. A model from a different vendor than the one that wrote the sentence sees only the source passage and the sentence, never the first model's reasoning, and is asked to disprove it. It defaults to rejecting anything it cannot confirm.

4. High-stakes items get a second editorial read. Four things trigger it: the item comes from the courts; it is a safety story that touches a live proceeding; it could identify a child receiving intervention services; or two sources contradict each other. A triggered item is read against a checklist covering publication bans, the difference between an accused person and a convicted one, defamation, and whether the people named are public officials or private citizens. What that read declines does not run — it is set aside for a person to decide, and if nobody reaches it within two days it stays unpublished.

What that read does not do. It is performed by a model, not by a person: a human sees only what the model rejects. And nothing here detects that an item names a private individual. The four triggers above are the whole list, so a named person outside them reaches the page without the second read. Telling a private citizen from a public figure is a judgement we have no reliable way to automate, and we would rather say so than let you assume a detector exists.

The important partWhen a sentence fails these checks it is removed. When a whole item fails, it is published as a headline and a link only, marked Brief. The system is built so that its worst outcome is telling you less, never telling you something untrue.

There are no reporters here. Everything on this site began as something an organisation chose to announce — a news release, a feed, a public dataset, a meeting agenda. Nothing is gathered by going and asking. If nobody published it, we do not have it.

That has a specific shape, and it is more useful to you as a list than as a disclaimer.

Anything announced only on Facebook or Instagram is invisible to us. A large amount of Edmonton community life is organised there, and none of it reaches this page.

We read four community-league websites, plus the federation's own news feed and calendar. There are well over a hundred leagues in the city and the rest of them are not covered.

We read English and French, and nothing else. Not Punjabi, Tagalog, Mandarin, Arabic or Cree. We do read First Nations and Métis governments, including the Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations — but only what they publish in English. There is Cree-language publishing in this region and we do not read a word of it, which is a gap in this paper and not a gap in the city.

Seeing something is not the same as ranking it well. The order of this paper is chosen by a model, and it gets that order wrong. When Edmonton marked 150 years of Treaty No. 6, the two items about it were ranked 41st and 137th and ran as a headline and a link. The invitation to the commemoration, issued jointly by the Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations and the City, was never ranked at all: it was published six days ahead, and this paper measures how current something is by when it was announced rather than when it happens — so an invitation can expire before the event it is inviting you to. Nothing about that day was beyond our reach. The ranking was ours and so is the rule that discarded the invitation.

The honest summaryThis is a summary of what Edmonton published in English on the open web, ordered by a machine. Read it as that and it is useful. Read it as a picture of the city and it will mislead you, in the direction of the organisations that already have a communications department.

If something here is wrong, it matters and we want to know. Email [email protected]. Corrections are made on the page and noted at the bottom of it.

Summaries are short, always attributed, and always linked back to the original. We do not republish other outlets' articles. Sports scores and standings are facts and are always linked to the league.

City of Edmonton datasets — permits, licences, transit disruptions, council records — are used under the City's open data licence, published as Open Government Licence – Edmonton. Its terms travel with the data: anything here derived from them is passed on under the same terms, with no further restrictions added. These datasets are publicly available from the City of Edmonton, and anyone can obtain them directly at data.edmonton.ca.

Provincial and federal data is used under the licences attached to each source. The City provides its data "as is" and without warranty, and is not responsible for anything published here.

What each source answered. The Sources page lists every source we poll, what its terms allow, which answered at the last press and which did not, and why — built from the poll record on every press, not written by hand.

Coverage gaps we know about. This list is dated, and it was wrong. It said the Confederacy of Treaty Six and the Edmonton-area First Nations published nothing a machine could read. That was true when it was checked and stopped being true within months, and nobody looked again — so a note recording “we checked and there is no way in” sat here reading as settled while the pages existed. We are now reading the Confederacy of Treaty Six, Enoch Cree Nation and Alexander First Nation. Enoch was missed for two years because the first check looked at /news/, which 404s, and the announcements live elsewhere.

Still missing, and each one for its own reason:

• Michel First Nation. The address we read now forwards to a different organisation’s site, and we found no site of the Nation’s own (checked 8 October 2026), so we stopped reading it.
• Several of Edmonton’s largest immigrant and diaspora community organisations have no source we can read daily. Re-checked 21 August 2026, fifteen candidates: most publish nothing a machine can read, and those that do have stopped. The Alberta Filipino Journal serves a working feed whose newest item is from September 2025; Punjabi Post last published in 2024, ECALA in 2023, ASSIST in 2018. The Asian Journal publishes weekly and is a British Columbia paper. A feed that answers is not the same as a feed that is publishing, and registering a dormant one would raise our source count while telling you nothing. Nothing was added, and this gap is real.
• The Alberta Gazette has no publisher we are permitted to read. Statutory notices are therefore absent.
• Alberta caselaw is thinner than the source count suggests. CanLII returns 403 without a key, and Alberta Law Libraries — the best digest available — forbids automated access in its robots file. What remains is the three courts’ own announcement feeds.
• Council and Legislature video is not read here: YouTube disallows the feed path by name. Meeting video is still reachable through the agenda link on each meeting, and recorded votes come from the minutes rather than the video.

The last three are new, and they exist because we started honouring robots.txt properly and found we had been reading sources that asked us not to. We would rather cover less and say so.