Respect the person
Challenge a claim, method, or interpretation without insults, harassment, threats, or assumptions about a contributor’s motives.
Useful disagreement, shared standards
Be generous with people and precise with claims.
OpenSoil welcomes practical experience, scientific evidence, careful uncertainty, and respectful correction. These guidelines apply to questions, replies, projects, methods, profiles, and submitted materials.
Community commitments
Make the conversation easier to trust.
Show relevant context
Include soil, crop, climate, management, timing, methods, and limitations needed to understand an observation.
Separate fact and interpretation
Distinguish what was measured, calculated, observed, inferred, modeled, or generated with AI assistance.
Protect privacy
Do not expose exact locations, client records, contact information, contracts, or unpublished work without permission.
Disclose interests
Say when you sell, manufacture, recommend, receive funding from, or otherwise benefit from a discussed product or service.
Correct the record
Welcome good-faith correction. Preserve meaningful revisions and explain why a conclusion or record changed.
Evidence language
Use the strongest claim the record can support—and no stronger.
A useful observation does not need to become a causal claim. Honest labels allow early evidence to remain valuable without overstating it.
Observed
A person saw or recorded something under stated conditions. The observation may be important even when the cause is unknown.
Measured
A value came from a documented instrument, laboratory, or field method with units, date, sample, and procedure attached.
Calculated or modeled
A result was derived from source values through a visible formula, statistical model, conversion, or analytical workflow.
Interpretation
A reasoned explanation of what evidence may mean. It should name assumptions, alternatives, uncertainty, and relevant sources.
Repeated or independently reviewed
The method or finding was repeated under defined conditions or examined by someone other than the original contributor. This strengthens—but does not make universal—the claim.
AI-assisted
AI helped extract, organize, summarize, translate, or draft content. Sources and human review remain visible; AI must not invent measurements or hide uncertainty.
Commercial participation
Products can be discussed. Marketing cannot masquerade as evidence.
- • Identify your company, role, and financial relationship.
- • Describe product analysis, rate, timing, placement, and comparison.
- • Do not use fabricated reviews, undisclosed testimonials, or coordinated voting.
- • Do not present one field response as universal proof.
- • Provide source data and methods when making performance claims.
- • Clearly label sponsored, manufacturer-run, or donated-input trials.
Privacy and consent
Only share what you have the right to share.
- • Generalize farm location when exact coordinates are unnecessary.
- • Obtain permission before sharing client, employee, neighbor, or collaborator information.
- • Remove personal data from reports, maps, images, and file metadata.
- • Do not upload proprietary laboratory or consultant materials without permission.
- • Respect withdrawn, embargoed, group-only, and private records.
- • Report accidental exposure promptly through the support page.
Moderation
Proportionate action with a visible reason.
OpenSoil may label, limit, correct, hide, or remove material that violates these standards; restrict accounts involved in spam, harassment, impersonation, fraud, privacy violations, or repeated unsupported promotion; and preserve records needed to investigate abuse or meet legal obligations. When practical and safe, contributors should receive a reason and a path to ask for review.
Moderation labels do not certify scientific truth. Community and expert review indicate that a record received a defined kind of review, not that uncertainty disappeared.
Report a concern or request review →