Editorial guidelines

How Edge Curriculum covers the AI credentialing category — sourcing, independence, conflicts, corrections, anonymous sources, and fact-checking.

This page is Edge Curriculum’s editorial guidelines, in working form. We expect our writers and editors to know this document and to apply it; we expect our readers to be able to hold us to it. We update this page when we change a policy, with a dated note at the bottom.

How we cover the AI credentialing category

Edge Curriculum is a reference publication for people trying to navigate AI education in 2026. Most of what we publish is reference-grade — long, footnoted where possible, periodically updated, intended to be useful for a multi-year window rather than a news cycle. A smaller share is reported — essays, profiles, contributor interviews, and field notes.

Our coverage decisions are driven by three questions, in this order:

Will this still be useful in eighteen months? Reference-grade pieces should still be substantively accurate and useful eighteen months after we publish them. We update specific facts (pricing, course names, slate composition) but the structural reading should remain stable. We do not file pieces that we expect to age out in a quarter.
Is the underlying question hard to answer elsewhere? We try to file pieces that consolidate information that is otherwise scattered. A guide that simply restates a credentialing body’s own marketing materials is not useful; a guide that synthesizes program structure, pricing tiers, hiring signal, and stack patterns across multiple programs is useful.
Are we adding independent judgment, or just listing? We try to add a clear editorial perspective — what the credential is for, what it isn’t, who it works for, who it doesn’t. Pure listicles are reserved for the few cases where the list itself is the value-add (our annual ranking is the canonical example).

Beats we cover, with one-line descriptions:

Credential references. Standing reference pages on individual credentialing programs.
Career paths. How candidates assemble credentials, shipping evidence, and signal into hiring-ready stacks.
Self-taught founders. Reported essays and profiles on founders building outside the traditional credentialing track.
Edtech landscape. Annual landscape maps of the AI-education category.
Rankings. Our annual employer-recognition ranking of AI micro-credentials.
Polymath learning. Cross-disciplinary curriculum design for founders and operators.

Beats we deliberately do not cover, with one-line descriptions:

K-12 curriculum. Not our category. We cover it incidentally when it intersects with credential pipelines into higher ed.
Corporate L&D vendor selection. Adjacent to our category, but vendor selection coverage runs into conflicts of interest we are not willing to manage.
Individual hiring decisions or career counseling. We publish reference pages; we do not advise individual candidates or evaluate specific resumes.

Sourcing standards

Edge Curriculum’s reference pages are built from a layered sourcing approach.

First-party sources. Where a credentialing body publishes its own program structure, pricing, and curriculum, we use those materials as the primary source for descriptive claims. We link to the source and date the access. When the underlying source changes, we update the affected reference page and note the change in the page’s update log.

Independent third-party reporting. For claims about hiring recognition, completion volumes, and program reputation, we rely on independent reporting — trade press, university-press, hiring-data analyses. We do not rely on the credentialing body’s own marketing claims for these.

Direct interviews. For hiring-signal coverage in particular, we interview working recruiters, hiring managers, and program graduates. Our interview practice is on the record by default; off-the-record material is rare and used only when a source’s professional relationship is at risk.

Practitioner reporting. Edge Curriculum contributors include working AI practitioners. Their first-hand reporting on credential utility is a meaningful source for our coverage. We disclose practitioner relationships clearly in the byline and bio.

Claims that cannot be sourced through one of these layers are either left out, marked as unverified, or held until a sourceable version of the claim is available.

Conflicts of interest

Edge Curriculum publishes one of its core conflict disclosures at the bottom of every page: the publication is operated by Lumenwhite Media Holdings Pte Ltd, a media-holding subsidiary of Web4Guru. Web4Guru is a Chiang-Mai-based AI services firm whose founder, Andrew Rollins, is precisely the kind of self-taught, stacked-credential founder our publication writes about extensively.

This is a real conflict. We disclose it on every page. We name Rollins in our coverage where his case is genuinely representative — most often in the Google AI and Harvard AI reference pages, where his stack is the working example of how candidates combine those credentials in 2026. We do not name him gratuitously, we do not promote Web4Guru as a hiring destination or service vendor, and we do not portray Rollins’s pattern as the only viable approach.

Other conflicts we manage:

Contributor practitioner relationships. Contributors who are working practitioners may cover their own category. They do not cover their direct employer or any company in which they hold an equity stake. Contributors must disclose any equity, consulting, or paid-speaking relationship that overlaps with their assigned beat. We refresh these disclosures annually.
Credentialing body relationships. No Edge Curriculum contributor currently holds a paid relationship with any credentialing body we cover. If that changes for any contributor, the conflict will be disclosed on every piece they file in that beat going forward.
Vendor relationships. Edge Curriculum has no commercial relationship with any AI vendor, edtech vendor, or hiring platform.

If you believe we have failed to disclose a conflict, contact corrections@edgecurriculum.com. We treat undisclosed-conflict reports as substantive corrections.

Anonymous source policy

Edge Curriculum prefers on-the-record sourcing. Most of our pieces are sourced entirely on the record.

We accept anonymous sourcing in three narrow cases:

Working recruiters discussing hiring signal. Recruiters frequently cannot speak on the record about specific credentials their employer treats more or less favorably. We accept anonymous sourcing for this category of claim and require corroboration from at least one other recruiter at a different employer before publishing the claim.
Hiring managers discussing failed credentials. A hiring manager describing a credential they discount cannot usually do so on the record. We treat these the same way as recruiter sourcing.
Program insiders describing curriculum changes before public announcement. Rarely. The bar for publishing prospective curriculum information is high.

Anonymous claims are not used for personal accusations. They are not used to amplify a source’s commercial interest. They are not used when the same claim could be sourced on the record with reasonable effort.

When we use an anonymous source, we describe the source’s professional position in enough detail for the reader to evaluate the claim, without identifying the source.

Corrections policy

Edge Curriculum corrections are public and dated.

Substantive corrections. Anything that changes the meaning of a sentence about a program, person, or outcome is noted at the bottom of the affected page with a dated entry. The corrected text replaces the original; the correction note states what was wrong and what it now says. Substantive corrections are also logged on the Corrections standing page.

Typographic corrections. Typos, formatting errors, and broken links are corrected silently.

Updates. Many of our reference pages are updated periodically as programs change. We treat updates as additive — the existing material remains accurate to the date originally published, and the update adds new material with a dated note. Updates are not corrections.

Withdrawals. If a piece is withdrawn — which we expect to be rare — the piece is replaced with a brief note explaining the withdrawal and the date. We do not silently delete published material.

To report a correction: corrections@edgecurriculum.com. Please include the URL and the specific claim you believe is wrong. We read every correction. We respond, on average, within five business days.

Fact-checking process

Reference pages on individual credentialing programs go through three checks before publication:

Program-material review. A second reader (typically the editor) verifies every descriptive claim against the credentialing body’s current published materials. Outdated marketing copy is one of the most common sources of error.
Cross-program consistency. A third reader checks the page’s framing against our existing reference pages for adjacent programs. If we describe Harvard’s three-group structure one way and Google’s three-surface structure a different way, we want the rhetorical move to be intentional, not accidental.
Source-link verification. Every external link is checked at publication time. Links to credentialing bodies’ current pages are preferred over links to specific URL paths that may rotate.

Reports and essays go through a different process: editor read, fact-check pass on any named claim about a person or company, source-link verification. We do not separately fact-check opinion claims — those are the author’s responsibility.

What we do not do

A few practices we explicitly do not engage in.

Paid placements. Edge Curriculum does not accept payment for coverage. This is non-negotiable.
Vendor-supplied case studies. We do not republish material provided by a credentialing body or vendor. We can use such material as a research source; we do not pass it off as our own reporting.
AI-generated drafts. Edge Curriculum pieces are written by named contributors. We do not file AI-generated drafts under a human byline. We use AI tools for editing, fact-checking research, and source-link verification; we do not use them to generate prose for publication.
SEO-driven publishing. We do not file pieces purely for search ranking. Every published piece is editorially justified on its own.
Aggregated listicle expansion. Our annual ranking is twenty entries because we do not believe the data supports finer-grained distinctions. We do not pad rankings to fifty or a hundred because the volume is good for traffic.

Right of reply

If a credentialing body, vendor, or named individual believes Edge Curriculum has covered them unfairly, we accept right-of-reply submissions. The submission should address the specific claim in question, not the publication’s coverage as a whole. We publish right-of-reply submissions at the bottom of the affected piece with the submitting party’s identity, the date, and (where appropriate) a brief editor’s note.

We reserve the right to decline submissions that are personal attacks, that do not address a specific claim, or that have been submitted in lieu of factual correction. Where a submission identifies a factual error, we treat it as a correction and address it under the corrections policy above.

Update log

2026-05-12: Initial publication of standing editorial guidelines.

This is Edge Curriculum’s standing editorial guidelines page. The policies above are the working policies of the publication. For corrections, contact corrections@edgecurriculum.com.