Evidence policy

Methodology

How picks make it into the public archive, what timestamps mean, and why weak rows are excluded instead of guessed.

Public inclusion rule

A public row must have an episode, picker, vehicle or explicitly flagged wildcard, and a usable evidence quote. Rows with blank evidence, placeholder cleanup text, or unresolved review status are not exported.

Timestamp policy

Timestamps should land on the actual vehicle mention where possible, not merely the start of the Two Car Garage prompt. If an older import pointed to the answer setup, it was corrected during final QA.

Transcript evidence

The archive prefers transcript-backed exact mentions. YouTube transcripts can mis-spell car names, so the evidence quote may preserve the spoken wording while the displayed vehicle uses a clean normalized name.

Non-car and wildcard picks

Occasional non-car or edge picks are only public when the podcast explicitly chose them. These are labelled as Non-car / wildcard rather than silently normalized into ordinary cars.

Podcast-source recovery

Episode #12 was missing from the YouTube inventory, so it was recovered from Acast podcast audio and locally transcribed. Its rows are included because the episode identity and Two Car Garage section were verified.

Rejected rows

Comedy riffs, fictional/out-of-scope vehicles, unsupported shifted imports, and rows contradicted by transcript review remain in the database as rejected rows. They are deliberately excluded from the public JSON.

Current trust status