Editorial Policy

1. Sourcing Standards

Every factual claim on a Maine Dispensary Guide page must trace to one of these source types:

• Maine OCP filings, license data, opt-in records, and rulemaking — our primary source for license-type, dispensary-count, and zoning claims.
• Maine Statutes — Title 28-B (adult-use cannabis), Title 22 (medical cannabis), and IRS Section 280E for tax claims.
• Federal primary sources — DEA scheduling actions, IRS guidance, and federal regulatory bodies, where directly relevant.
• Documented operator interviews — operator interviews are conducted by named contributors and the transcript or audio is retained for editorial-record purposes. Operators are cited by business name + role when they grant permission.
• Third-party industry research — e.g., Whitney Economics reports cited with year + publication date + retrieval URL.

Secondary reporting, syndication, and unsourced claims are not used. Where a citation is missing or an inference is required, the page must explicitly say so.

2. Byline Policy

Every page on mainedispensaryguide.com carries a named byline linked to an author profile. The five named editorial contributors are:

• Steve Kelly — Founder & Publisher
• Calvin Waters — Licensing & Compliance Analyst
• Margaret Finch — Finance & Taxation Analyst
• Eliot Nash — Market & Real Estate Analyst
• Thalia Greene — Cultivation & Horticulture Reviewer

Each contributor's area of coverage is listed on their author profile page (see the authors index). Contributor expertise boundaries are respected: a tax page is written by Margaret Finch + reviewed against the latest OCP and IRS guidance, not by another contributor working outside their scope. Reviewer assignments rotate in pairs so no single point of editorial failure exists.

3. Fact-Check Cadence

Every page goes through three review phases before publication:

1. Drafted against primary sources, with inline citations to those sources.
2. Reviewed by a second contributor against the same primary sources.
3. Approved by an editorial signatory on YMYL pages (legal, tax, compliance, financial).

YMYL pages — those in our legal, tax, compliance, finance, and health-adjacent content pillars — carry a "Last reviewed" badge documenting the most recent verification date and the reviewer pair. The cadence varies by content type: time-sensitive data (OCP license counts, tax rates, operating hours) is reviewed monthly; legal references (statutes, court rulings, OCP rulemaking) are reviewed quarterly at minimum.

4. Corrections Workflow

Corrections are tracked publicly at /about/corrections. The corrections log has been continuously maintained since launch and shows:

• The date an error was identified
• The original claim and its source
• The corrected claim and its source
• The pages affected
• The reviewer who signed off on the correction

Corrections are dated at the time of correction, not retroactively. If a page was updated without an entry in the corrections log, that is itself a process violation we treat as a bug.

5. Use of Automation and AI

Maine Dispensary Guide uses LLM-based tooling as a productivity aid in editorial workflows — drafting, restructuring, citation formatting, editorial-routine research, and summarization. Specific rules:

• LLM-assisted drafting is always reviewed by a named human contributor against primary sources before publication. No page ships without a human-signed review.
• LLMs do not generate authoritative claims from memory; all factual statements are sourced and reviewed against primary documents.
• LLMs do not replace named byline attribution. The author of record for a page is always a named human contributor.
• Editorial-routine pages (page templates, structured data, sitemap, etc.) may be partially LLM-generated under contributor review.

Where LLM-assisted drafting is material to the page content, the date of the most recent AI-assisted review is documented in the page's authoring metadata. We treat undisclosed AI use as an editorial-integrity violation equivalent to an undisclosed contributor.

6. Independence and Conflicts of Interest

Maine Dispensary Guide is reader-supported and accepts limited vendor and CPA referral fees. All referral relationships are disclosed on the page where they appear, and on the /affiliate-disclosure page. Editorial contributors do not receive compensation contingent on a specific editorial outcome.

Where a contributor has an ownership, employment, or financial interest in a business they are reviewing, that interest is disclosed on the page. We treat undisclosed conflicts of interest as editorial-integrity violations.

7. Sponsorship, Affiliate, and Disclosure

Where a page is sponsored, sponsored content is disclosed at the top of the article with the named sponsor. Sponsored editorial is held to the same sourcing and fact-check standards as organic editorial.

Where a page includes an affiliate link or referral, the relationship is disclosed adjacent to the link. Affiliate relationships do not affect our editorial judgments or rankings.

8. Press and Corrections Contact

Corrections: editorial@mainedispensaryguide.com (preferred for editorial-integrity inquiries)

Press: press@mainedispensaryguide.com

Operator and licensing inquiries: /contact

Frequently Asked Questions