Guides
Source Selection
How to choose reliable sources that will maximize your market rating.
What Makes a Good Source?
Good sources are authoritative, accessible, and likely to contain the exact information needed to resolve your market. The resolution agent will fetch these URLs and extract information based on your prompt.
Source Hierarchy
Prefer sources in this order of reliability:
Official websites of the organization or entity being measured. Examples: formula1.com for F1 results, sec.gov for financial filings.
Established data aggregators with editorial standards. Examples: Reuters, AP News, Bloomberg for financial data.
Major news organizations with fact-checking processes. Use as secondary sources to corroborate primary sources.
Wikipedia, social media, forums, and other user-editable sources should be avoided as they can be manipulated.
Source Requirements
Sources must be accessible without authentication or payment. The resolution agent cannot log in or bypass paywalls.
Content must be in HTML, JSON, plain text, or PDF format. Images, videos, and interactive widgets cannot be parsed.
Choose URLs that will still work at resolution time. Avoid URLs with session IDs or temporary tokens.
Verify the URL will contain the exact information needed. Results pages should be populated by resolution time.
How Many Sources?
More sources provide redundancy and improve rating scores:
| Sources | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| 1 | Minimum viable, but risky if source fails |
| 2-3 | Acceptable with high-quality sources |
| 4-5 | Recommended for important markets |
| 5+ | Maximum score for source count criterion |
Source Diversity
Use diverse sources to reduce single points of failure:
- >Mix official sources with reputable aggregators
- >Include sources from different geographic regions when possible
- >Avoid sources that all pull from the same upstream data
- >Consider sources with different update schedules
Example Source Strategies
Sports Event- Official league website (primary)
- ESPN or similar sports network
- Major news outlet sports section
Financial Data- Exchange official website (primary)
- Bloomberg or Reuters
- Yahoo Finance or Google Finance
Election Results- Official election authority website (primary)
- Associated Press election results
- Major national newspaper