Data sources and corrections

Where the data comes from

Nothing on a listing is invented and nothing is bought from a data broker. Details come from five places, in this order of preference:

1. The business’s own published material. Its website, its menu, its booking page, its own social profiles. This is the best source and the one used first.
2. Public registers. The ABN register for trading names, NSW Fair Trading for New South Wales trade licences, and the Victorian Building Authority for Victorian plumbing and building registrations.
3. Council and tourism board listings. Useful for opening hours of parks, halls, galleries and community facilities.
4. The owner. Once a listing is claimed, the owner’s version overrides everything above it, and the page says the details are owner maintained.
5. The Google Places API, for a rating and review count only. Where a Google rating appears it carries the date it was fetched. Where it does not appear, we do not have it, and the page says so rather than showing a number nobody can trace.

What every listing shows

• Sources. The URLs the details were read from, listed on the page.
• Last checked. The date somebody last opened those sources and compared them to what is published here.
• Confidence. High means the detail was seen on the business’s own site or on an official register. Anything lower came from a single third party and is marked accordingly.
• Licence status. Where a licence has been verified, the listing shows the number, the class, the register it was checked against, a link to that register and the date of the check.

The point of publishing all of that is that you do not have to take our word for anything. Every check on this site can be repeated by a reader in about a minute.

What goes stale, honestly

A directory that claims to be always accurate is lying, and everyone reading it knows. Here is what actually degrades.

• Opening hours. The most fragile field on the site. School holidays, Christmas, and the fact that New South Wales and Victoria do not share a public holiday calendar all break them. Ring ahead for anything that matters, and especially around a long weekend on the border where one side is working and the other is not.
• Phone numbers and email addresses. These change without ceremony and without a public announcement.
• Prices and callout fees. Treated as indicative. They are read from published material at a point in time and they move.
• Businesses that have closed. Closures are often invisible online for months. If you find one, tell us and it gets marked closed rather than deleted, so the next person searching for it finds out what happened.
• No verified badge is not a black mark. It means a licence has not been checked yet. A check that fails is never published as a failure.

Report a correction

Anyone can report anything. You do not need an account, you do not have to own the business and you do not have to explain who you are.

1. Send the form below. The source URL field is the one that makes this fast.
2. It is acknowledged by a person within two business days. Not an autoresponder telling you it has been received.
3. The claim is checked against the source you gave and against the source already on the listing.
4. It is fixed within five business days, or you get an explanation naming the source we relied on so you can tell us what is wrong with it.
5. The listing’s last checked date is reset, and where the change alters a fact a reader could have acted on, the page carries a dated note.

Removing a listing

A business that does not want to be listed does not have to be listed. Ask, and the listing comes down.

• Send the request through the form above or to hello@localsknow.com.au, from an address connected to the business or from the phone number on the listing.
• No reason is required and none will be asked for.
• Nothing is charged, now or later.
• The listing is removed within two business days.
• The URL redirects to the category page it sat in, so old links and printed cards do not lead to an error.
• It stays off. Removed businesses are recorded on a suppression list so a later import does not put them back.

Removal is a different thing from a correction and a different thing from a legal complaint. If you believe something on this site is defamatory or infringes your rights, say so plainly in the message and it goes to the top of the queue. The terms of use set out the rest.

Bulk and automated access

Scraping the site is not permitted. Researchers, journalists and councils who want aggregate numbers should ask instead, through the contact form, choosing Media. We will explain how a figure was computed and what the sample was. That is a better answer than a crawl and it takes less of your time.