About
A site that asks to be believed about numbers has to say who runs it, on whose money, and what happens when it gets something wrong.
Who runs this site
The Observatory is run by Vis Digital, based in the province of Enna, Italy. It is not the work of a registered news organisation: it is an archive of public data, put back in order and kept up to date automatically. To write, correct or report an error: osservatorio@vis.digital.
How it is funded
The site carries no advertising, has no sponsors and receives no public or private funding. The costs are those of a small site — the server, the database, the domain — and Vis Digital pays them. If funding ever arrived, it would be written here before anywhere else.
Independence
No party, institution or organisation has any say over what is published. The data comes from four official public sources, and the site shows the figure even when it contradicts what we expected to find: that is exactly why it exists.
When we get it wrong
Mistakes happen, and on these subjects a mistake travels fast. When we find one — or you report one — the correction is made and written down, with the date and what changed. A published figure is never quietly deleted.
The data is yours
Every chart has its CSV underneath, with the source and the date inside the file. The sources are published under CC BY 4.0 and the site keeps a copy of the original files, because some sources delete them after two weeks.