Methodology
Make the pipeline legible and the maintenance work repeatable.
The best way to keep the visuals impressive is to make the underlying process boringly consistent. This page explains what the tracker stores, how winners are derived, and what a high-confidence maintenance loop should look like.
Product Direction
The tracker is now split into overview, archive, hosts, QA, and methodology views so the data can be audited like an editorial database instead of buried in one long page.
87%
tracked coverage
Measured against the working manual catalog count.
5%
reviewed coverage
0 rows are verified today.
5%
evidence coverage
Future reruns should attach proof by default.
0.92
average confidence
Useful for triaging manual review order.
Model
What the tracker currently treats as canonical
The rules below are what keep the shared tracker library stable across pages.
Responses are the source of truth
Winners are derived from `responses.correct`, not trusted from stale `winner` labels.
Ties and stumpers are explicit
A tie means multiple correct answers. A stumper means nobody got it right.
Identity gaps stay visible
Known historical panelists and guest-name gaps are surfaced as QA issues instead of being erased from the story.
Milestones beat fake certainty
Until every appearance is modeled, the host timeline uses evidence-backed snapshots rather than guessed era boundaries.
Date-only reruns are not precise enough
Late-2023 and early-2024 Friday releases include same-day bonus episodes, so maintenance commands should target the episode title as well as the date.
Some long episodes need a longer tail
If a known quiz episode comes back with no quiz found, rerun it with a larger `--tail-minutes` window before treating the result as authoritative.
Workflow
The maintenance loop now has one intended path.
These are the commands that should be reused for reruns and merges so corrections replace stale rows instead of quietly getting skipped.
node scripts/economist-podcasts/checks-and-balance/extract.mjs --catalog --include-tracked --from 2024-03-01 --title-contains "Welcome to New York" --tail-minutes 15node scripts/economist-podcasts/_merge-batch.cjs scripts/economist-podcasts/checks-and-balance/batches/YYYY-MM-DD_batch.json --replacenpx tsc --noEmitNext Layer
What would make this feel truly host-ready
The architecture is in a much better place now, but the biggest quality jump still comes from richer evidence and explicit episode-status tracking.
Add an episode-status registry: verified no-quiz, needs extraction, blocked source, or tracked quiz.
Store transcript evidence snippets and timestamps for every verified row.
Promote real people and appearances into first-class records instead of inferring them from response slots.
Keep QA and archive views separate so the public-facing pages can stay elegant without hiding uncertainty.