Editorial standards

parkverdict is an independent publication of Mine Marketing LTD. These are the standards every page on the site is held to. Last updated: August 2026.

Independence

No park, agency or advertiser pays for a score, a ranking position or coverage. The Experience Score is computed by a fixed formula before any advertisement is ever placed near it, and advertising is always labelled and kept visually separate from editorial. We have no commercial relationship with the National Park Service or any land-management agency.

Sourcing

Facts, activities, fees, coordinates and photographs come from official public-domain government data, chiefly the National Park Service Data API and Recreation.gov. Individual photos may carry their own credit, shown on the page. The official agency listing is always the authority for hours, fees and closures before you travel.

How the analysis is written, and where AI fits

Our editorial process is AI-assisted and human-reviewed. The Experience Score and every figure on the site are computed directly from the public data, never written by a model. The connective, plain-language analysis around those figures is drafted with the help of large language models working strictly from each unit's real data fields, then reviewed by our founding editor against the source before it publishes. We do not allow the model to invent a fact, a number, a source or a superlative, and we do not estimate anything the data cannot measure. We disclose this process here, once, rather than stamping an "AI-generated" banner on every page, because per-page banners add noise without adding honesty. This disclosure covers the whole site.

What the score measures, and what it cannot

The Experience Score is a breadth-and-access index. It measures how much a unit documents and how easily you can reach it. It deliberately does not try to measure scenery, crowding, trail or road conditions, weather, or the quality of a particular program, because our data cannot see those things. Every analytical page states these limits plainly.

Bylines and dates

Analytical pages carry a named byline linking to our editor and both a published and a last-updated date, so you can always tell when a page was written and when it was last checked.

Corrections

We date our figures and we do not silently rewrite published numbers. When we get something materially wrong, we fix it and log it on our public corrections page. If you spot an error, please tell us.