Terms of Service

These are the terms you accept by using Significadopedia. They are as strict as they need to be about ownership and as short as we could make them everywhere else, because a page written to tire you out is a page written in bad faith. Last updated: August 2026.

Reading the site counts as agreeing

By opening a page here you accept what is written below. If a clause is unacceptable, the remedy is to close the tab, and we would rather you did that than clicked past something you had not read.

Reading has no age gate. Posting a comment or sending us material does: you must be sixteen or older, or have a parent’s permission where local law sets a lower threshold. Nothing here removes a right your own consumer law gives you.

What we own, and the licence you get

The articles, the headlines, the explanations inside them, the Spanish glossary entries, the photographs and graphics we made and the arrangement of the pages belong to the publisher or are used under licence. Free to read is not the same as unowned.

You get a personal, non-commercial licence to read, print a copy for yourself, and send somebody the link. Quoting us is welcome on the terms in our copyright and DMCA policy: a short passage, attributed to us by name, with a link in the copy where a reader will see it. Everything past that needs permission, and permission is a conversation rather than a refusal.

Scraping, and training a model on our explanations

The explanations are the asset. Each one exists because a writer spent an hour they could have spent on the news working out how to say what a squad cost rule is, or what a battery chemistry changes about a recall, without leaning on a second term the reader also does not know. Collecting that in bulk to feed something else is not a grey area to us.

So, plainly: you may not harvest this site for text and data mining, corpus building, model training, fine-tuning, or as a retrieval store behind an answer engine, and you may not commission somebody else to do it for you. We reserve those rights expressly, including the machine-readable reservation of text and data mining rights the law in several places allows. Our robots file and our response headers say the same thing as this paragraph.

We are not squeamish about the technology. We use these tools for interview transcripts and a first pass at translation between our English and Spanish copy, and we wrote down exactly where on our editorial standards page. What we object to is the taking. We have watched a model produce a fluent definition that was wrong in the way only somebody who knew the subject would catch, and when the sentences came out of our glossary that failure arrives wearing our clothes. If you want this material for training there is a licensing route and a price. Ask.

What you may not do here

Some of the following is obvious. We are listing it anyway, because obvious has never once prevented an email arguing the point at length.

The restrictions below apply by hand or by script, whether the output is sold, given away or kept.

• Automated collection beyond ordinary search-engine crawling that respects our robots file.
• Republishing an article in full, in the original or in translation, without written permission.
• Framing or mirroring our pages so the work appears under somebody else’s masthead.
• Stripping bylines, correction notes or date stamps from anything you may reuse.
• Presenting our copy as another outlet’s, or another outlet’s as ours.
• Using our name to suggest a partnership that does not exist.
• Interfering with the site, or working around rate limits and access controls.
• Using the site unlawfully, or to harass a person named in our reporting.

Comments and anything else you send us

The comment rules are short. No abuse of a person named in a story, no publishing somebody’s private details, no impersonation of a real person or of this outlet, no marketing links. That last one arrives constantly, because the paid definition offer we refuse on the commercial side changes hat and turns up in a comment field, where it gets the same answer.

We moderate, edit for length and clarity, close threads and remove accounts, and we do it without a hearing. The comment section is a feature we run at our own cost, not a public square you hold a right to occupy. Nothing we leave up is an endorsement of it.

By posting a comment you give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to publish it, keep it beside the piece, edit it for length and clarity, and hold it in our archive. You keep ownership and confirm the words are yours to give. Material sent unprompted is not confidential unless we agreed a route first, which our contact page explains before you attach anything.

Links out and embedded material

We link to documents, statements, regulations and other outlets because an explanation with no source behind it is an assertion in a nicer font. Those pages are not ours. We do not control what they say next week or what they set on your device.

The same goes for embedded posts, players and maps loading from somewhere else. A link is a reference, never a recommendation. What our journalism is and is not for sits on the disclaimer page.

No warranties

The site is provided as it is and as it happens to be available. We do not promise it will be uninterrupted, that every page will load, or that nothing here contains an error, because we have published errors and our corrections policy is the record of it.

To the extent the law allows, we exclude the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We exclude nothing the law says cannot be excluded.

Liability, and the part you cover

We are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential loss, for lost profit or lost data, or for a decision you took on the strength of something you read here. Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded it is limited to the minimum the law permits. You pay us nothing to read the site, which makes the usual refund cap an awkward fit, and we would rather say so than pretend a formula solves it.

If you do one of the things listed above and a claim comes at us because of it, you cover our costs and any damages. That clause is aimed at the scraper who republishes an article and attracts a complaint, never at a reader.

Suspension and termination

We can block access, remove a comment account, or refuse service to a system taking copy in bulk, and we will do it without notice where the activity is doing damage while we type. Repeat copyright infringement ends access permanently.

If we have got that wrong, tell us. An automated block catching a real reader is a fault on our side, and it gets fixed the same working day.

Law, disputes and changes to these terms

These terms are governed by the law applicable at the publisher’s place of business and any dispute is dealt with there, without prejudice to the rights a consumer holds where they live. Before anything formal, write to support@significadopedia.com and give us thirty days, which is faster than either of us would manage otherwise.

We change these terms when the site changes or the law does, and the date at the top moves when we do. Continued use after a change means you accept the new version, and we do not apply a change backwards. What we collect while you are here is on the privacy policy page.