Methodology
How we collect visa data, how confidence is scored, and how to challenge a record.
Where the data comes from
We pull from 45 distinct sources across six categories. Government and treaty sources are authoritative; Wikipedia provides breadth for the long tail; manually curated content covers programs whose authority publishes only in PDF or press releases.
Every record on this site is tagged with the source it came from. On the result page you'll see the source as a chip beside the answer. The “Apply on official site” button always points at the destination's government portal — never an affiliate, never a paid intermediary.
One promise: no visa middlemen
Every Apply link on this site sends you directly to the destination's official government portal. We never link to commercial visa-service intermediaries (ivisa, iVisa.com, visafornora, visahq, etc.), and we never charge a service fee on top of the government's own fee. A handful of governments outsource the operational intake to VFS or a similar contractor — when that's the only official channel, we link there and label it plainly (e.g. “Operated by VFS on behalf of the Surinamese government”). You should never reach a payment page that isn't the government's.
If you ever spot us linking to a commercial visa-service middleman, that's a bug. Tell us and we'll fix it.
Sources by category
Government / official
Direct from the destination country's official government portal. Highest authority.
Regional bloc treaty
Derived from regional treaty (Schengen Reg. 2018/1806, ECOWAS Free Movement Protocol, CARICOM CSME, etc.).
Wikipedia (community-curated)
Wikipedia's community-edited 'Visa requirements for X citizens' pages. Useful for breadth, not authoritative on details. Licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0.
| Source | Records | Last fetched |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia visa-requirements (long tail) | 0 | — |
Curated (hand-maintained by us)
Hand-encoded from official program documentation. Updated when programs launch or change.
Refresh cadence
Government scrapers refresh nightly via a hosted GitHub Actions cron (04:00 UTC). Wikipedia long-tail is refreshed on demand; it changes slowly. Manual / curated programs are reviewed when policy news breaks.
Every record carries two timestamps: last fetched (when our scraper last pulled the page) and last verified (when a primary source confirmed the fact, or the cross-source check agreed with the destination's ministry of foreign affairs). The two are deliberately distinct.
Confidence scoring
Per-field authority weights (1.0 = full confidence). Each record's overall bucket is the lowest field weight, scaled by freshness decay (records older than 180 days drop a bucket).
| Source kind | status | cost | processing | app URL | max stay | requirements |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Government / official | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 0.90 |
| Embassy | 0.95 | 0.95 | 0.90 | 0.95 | 0.90 | 0.85 |
| Regional bloc treaty | 0.90 | 0.50 | 0.50 | — | 0.90 | 0.70 |
| Wikipedia (community-curated) | 0.60 | 0.30 | 0.20 | 0.20 | 0.60 | 0.40 |
| Wikidata | 0.65 | — | — | — | 0.60 | — |
| Curated (hand-maintained by us) | 0.85 | 0.80 | 0.70 | 0.85 | 0.85 | 0.80 |
Cross-source check
Wikipedia long-tail rows start at low confidence. A nightly job (npm run cross-check) compares each row against the destination's curated MFA visa-portal HTML. If the MFA explicitly mentions the passport's nationality with a consistent status, the row is upgraded to medium confidence and shown a green “Confirmed against [destination] MFA” badge. If the MFA explicitly contradicts, the row gets a red banner telling users to verify before booking.
How to challenge a record
If you spot something wrong, click Report incorrect info on the result card. Reports go to a moderation queue at /admin/review-queue. We respond within a week.
Licensing
Wikipedia-derived rows are licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0 — attribution preserved per row in the result card footer. Government-source content is reproduced under fair-use / public-domain provisions; we link back to the original on every record. Code is MIT.
What we don't do
- We don't process visa applications.
- We don't take affiliate revenue from visa-application services.
- We don't give legal immigration advice.
- We don't sell user data.
See also: live changelog · about · source-health dashboard.