Editorial standards & source policy

These are the rules we hold ourselves to. They are meant to make it easy to check our work and to be honest about what general guidance can and cannot do.

How we source claims

Substantive technical claims are tied to public primary sources — technical notes from the Concrete Masonry & Hardscapes Association, building-science guidance, and U.S. National Park Service preservation guidance among them. Each article lists the sources it relies on, with a direct link to the publisher’s own page, checked on the article’s build date. Listing a source is not an endorsement of any product mentioned on it. Where sources disagree or a point is uncertain, we say so rather than papering over it.

What we will not publish

• No fabricated authors, credentials, or “expert-reviewed” badges. Articles carry the BIM for Masonry editorial desk as a publication desk, not a named individual claiming professional review.
• No reviews, ratings, testimonials, or invented statistics.
• No structural diagnosis, and no do-it-yourself excavation, underpinning, or reinforcement instructions.
• No specific product prescriptions, dimensions, or spacings presented as universal.
• No rehosted files pretending to restore historical downloads.

The limits of general guidance

Everything here is general educational information, not a building-specific engineering or preservation assessment. Moisture problems are local by nature — they depend on construction, soil, groundwater, climate, and history. Our guides deliberately stop short of telling you what to do to a particular wall, and they repeatedly point to the threshold where a qualified on-site professional is warranted: pressure, movement, rapid water entry, or contamination.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, it should be fixed. Corrections are made in place, and material changes are dated so the record stays honest. We would rather say “not yet available” than list a contact that does not work.

These standards in practice

These rules are easiest to judge against the work itself. See how sourcing and limits play out in our guide to waterproofing old stone basement walls and in the BIM & wall-detail coordination reference, which states plainly what a coordinated model can and cannot do.