How we work
Combat Sports UK uses AI to help research and draft its journalism. Every article is checked against its source before it is published, a named editor is accountable for the site, and we say on every article that AI was involved.
Who is responsible
Darren Murray is the editor of Combat Sports UK and is accountable for everything published here. Articles are drafted with AI from a named source. Before publication each draft is read against that source by an AI editor and passes a set of automated editorial checks: every fact and every quotation must appear in the source, results are checked against our own fight database, and the house style is enforced.
Bylines say who read the piece. Articles that pass through those checks without the editor reading them first are published as Combat Sports UK Staff. Only articles the editor has read and approved before publication carry his name.
Stories that accuse a named person of wrongdoing - criminal allegations, doping, match-fixing or abuse - are never published automatically. They wait for the editor.
Approval is recorded against a specific version of an article. If the text changes afterwards, the approval lapses automatically and the article goes back through the checks before it returns to the site.
How we source stories
Much of our news is written from reporting by an identifiable outlet. When it is, that outlet is named and linked at the first reported fact and listed under the article, and the piece is written in our own words rather than copied. Where we learn of a story from a social account that reposts other people’s work, that account is recorded as where we found it and is never cited as the source. We trace the claim back to something accountable — the person who said it, the promotion that announced it, or an identifiable outlet doing its own reporting — and we credit that outlet plainly.
A story that only ever traces back to a repost does not get published here.
What we will not assert
Where sources disagree and we cannot resolve it, we say so in the article rather than quietly picking one. We would rather tell you what is unresolved than sound more certain than we are.
The same applies to fight data. Where our source records that a fight ended early but not whether it was a knockout or a submission, we say it was a finish and give the round — we do not guess. Where a ranking feed disagrees with reality, a human-verified record takes precedence over the feed.
Pictures
Most article images are our own graphics and illustrations, made in our house style and credited to Combat Sports UK. Illustrations of real people are drawn from a reference photo and checked against it. Where we use a photograph, it is an official photo published by the promotion itself, such as the UFC’s fighter portraits, or a photo released under a Creative Commons licence, and the caption says whose it is. We do not use agency photography.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know. When we find a mistake, or a reader points one out, we fix the article straight away. Use the contact form and choose “Correction”.
Times
Every time on this site is UK local — GMT or BST as applicable. A card that starts on Saturday night in America and finishes on Sunday morning here is described the way a British reader experiences it.