From collection to publication
A source being reachable is not enough. Each collector is limited to a documented scope and must pass source-specific validation before its facts can affect a public record.
- Collect. Request a bounded set of public promotion, commission or publication pages. The request records its source identity and retrieval time.
- Validate. Check required sections, expected divisions, stable identifiers and internally consistent rows. Partial or malformed publications fail before persistence where a complete set is required.
- Reconcile. Match a source event or bout to an existing canonical record only when the identity evidence is strong enough. Source-local rows remain traceable.
- Publish. Return the strongest accepted value for each field together with its verification state. Cancelled and superseded bouts are excluded from active public lists.
Which source takes priority?
Authority depends on the question. A commission is strongest for an official result, while a promotion announcement is normally strongest for its upcoming card. An administrator-reviewed correction has the highest local authority and must be supported by evidence.
| Fact type | Order of authority, strongest first |
|---|---|
| Completed outcome | Official athletic commission result → official promotion announcement → ESPN scoreboard → Wikipedia secondary facts → unverified manual submission |
| Upcoming schedule | Official promotion announcement → official commission schedule → ESPN scoreboard → Wikipedia secondary facts |
| Reviewed correction | A documented, administrator-reviewed correction can override a local public value while retaining its supporting provenance. |
A lower-authority source cannot erase or replace a stronger accepted winner, result, method, round, time or official. The difference is retained for review rather than silently discarded.
Identity, duplicates and source conflicts
Events are not merged solely because their names and dates look similar. Automatic cross-source event matches require a score of at least 75 using date, venue, city, promotion, shared fighters and, where available, a commission event number.
For bouts, Fights Now compares the fighter pair, event, date, organization, sport and non-conflicting stage or result details. Same-source rematches, tournament stages and ambiguous rows remain separate. Boxing publication names without a stable athlete identifier are kept as name-only evidence; fuzzy identity matching is not used to attach them to a profile.
Rankings, snapshots and movement
A ranking is always tied to its publisher, division and snapshot. A changed valid publication creates a new snapshot; earlier snapshots are not overwritten. Movement is calculated against that same division's immediately preceding snapshot, so a new observation date alone does not fabricate movement.
- Publication date versus observation date: when a publisher supplies a date, it is retained. When it does not, the interface must describe when Fights Now observed the page instead.
- Vacancies and interim champions: these states are stored only when the publisher explicitly presents them.
- Limited publications: a five-person media list or champion-only list is not presented as a complete divisional ranking.
How sporting importance works
Sporting importance is a deterministic 0–100 context score for upcoming fights. It estimates competitive significance—not popularity, entertainment value, ticket sales, commercial value or the likely winner.
| Component | Maximum | Accepted evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Fighter calibre | 40 | Current, promotion-matched divisional rankings; pound-for-pound only as fallback; current WBC, WBA, IBF or WBO evidence for boxing. |
| Championship stakes | 30 | The bout is explicitly stored as a championship fight. A champion merely appearing does not trigger these points. |
| Official billing | 15 | Both fighters conservatively match the “A vs B” headliner in the event title. |
| Competitive context | 10 | A published tournament stage or explicit mandatory-challenger designation. Rank #1 alone is not treated as mandatory. |
| Event scale | 5 | Numbered UFC or GLORY cards, Grand Prix or world-championship events; Fight Night cards receive two points. |
The weaker-ranked fighter carries more weight within the calibre component, which favors an elite, well-matched bout over a highly ranked athlete facing an unknown opponent. An event combines its strongest active fight with 15% of the second-highest and 5% of the third-highest score, capped at 100.
Confidence is reported separately. It rises with stronger identity, ranking, title, billing, tournament and verification evidence, but it never increases the score itself. Stale rankings decay toward a neutral unknown baseline rather than toward zero.
Known methodological limits
- Most collection is periodic, not live. A card can change between source checks.
- Some publishers provide a date but no timezone-qualified start time. Fights Now leaves the instant unset instead of treating local wall time as UTC.
- Some result PDFs are scanned, redacted or use changing layouts; fields that cannot be extracted safely remain absent.
- A secondary scoreboard may omit methods, divisions or title status. Those details are not inferred from surrounding context.
- Coverage reflects registered sources and is not a complete record of every worldwide combat-sports event.