sherafy.com now has two straightforward ways for readers to participate in the research behind the site.
If you encounter a claim, document, chart, video, study, screenshot, statistic, or strange question that deserves a closer look, you can send it to us as a research request.
If you are the kind of person who would rather investigate the question yourself, you can apply to become a sherafy.com contributor and publish work under your own name.
They are different levels of participation, but they serve the same purpose:
Find worthwhile questions and do the work necessary to answer them properly.
Have something we should investigate? Send a research request
The sherafy.com Research Requests page is for readers who encounter something that deserves more scrutiny.
You might have seen:
- a viral video making a surprising claim;
- a statistic repeated across social media;
- a chart that looks suspicious;
- a new study being described in dramatic terms;
- an unusual government document;
- a screenshot whose context is unclear;
- conflicting explanations of the same event;
- a news story that leaves an obvious question unanswered; or
- something you simply cannot find a satisfactory answer to.
You do not need to conduct the investigation yourself.
Send us the original source when possible and tell us the specific question you think needs answering.
For example:
This chart says crime increased 400%. Is that actually a fair comparison?
Or:
This clip claims a public official said this. Is the video authentic, and what was the surrounding context?
Or simply:
Everyone seems to be repeating this number. Where did it originally come from?
Those are exactly the kinds of questions sherafy.com is built to investigate.
Research requests are leads, not votes
Submitting something does not guarantee that we will publish an article about it.
Reader requests are one way we identify worthwhile research opportunities.
We also consider:
- whether reliable evidence exists;
- whether the question can actually be answered;
- how useful the answer would be to other readers;
- whether the subject is already well explained elsewhere;
- whether multiple submissions point toward the same underlying question;
- how much research would be required; and
- whether there is something meaningful sherafy.com can add.
Ten people submitting the same claim may tell us that a question is spreading.
It does not tell us what the answer should be.
The conclusion still follows the evidence.
You don’t need to know whether something is true before sending it
A research request is not an allegation.
You do not need to arrive with a conclusion.
In fact, some of the best questions begin with:
“I don’t know if this is true, but can somebody actually check?”
Sometimes the viral claim turns out to be substantially correct.
Sometimes there is a real story underneath it, but the version circulating online is exaggerated.
Sometimes the original source has been badly misunderstood.
And sometimes a dramatic claim collapses completely once the underlying evidence is examined.
All of those are useful outcomes.
The point of the research request system is to identify the question—not predetermine its answer.
Want to do more than send the question?
There is now another path.
sherafy.com is also opening its publishing system to a limited number of independent researchers, writers, analysts, subject-matter experts, and unusually persistent curious people.
You can read the full program at:
This is deliberately not a conventional “write for us” program.
We are not looking for a large pool of freelance writers producing generic articles to fill a publishing calendar.
We are looking for people who find questions they cannot stop thinking about and are willing to follow those questions far enough to produce something worth publishing.
You don’t need to already be a journalist
Professional experience can be useful.
It is not a prerequisite.
You do not need:
- a journalism degree;
- a large social-media following;
- an established personal brand;
- a traditional writing résumé; or
- thousands of published articles.
What matters much more is whether you can:
- identify an interesting question;
- locate credible evidence;
- distinguish strong sources from weak ones;
- reason carefully;
- recognize uncertainty;
- notice contradictions;
- explain what the evidence actually establishes; and
- change your conclusion when stronger evidence requires it.
A professional researcher can do that.
So can a subject-matter expert.
So can an unusually determined amateur who happens to notice the document everyone else missed.
Contributors publish under their own names
Accepted contributors can develop work through sherafy.com‘s editorial system and publish under their own bylines.
sherafy.com provides the publishing and editorial infrastructure around that work, including things such as:
- editorial review;
- source and evidence review;
- fact-checking;
- research support;
- help strengthening an argument or investigation;
- headline and search-intent development;
- structural editing;
- AI-assisted editorial tools;
- internal linking;
- publication on sherafy.com; and
- an author profile associated with the contributor’s work.
The goal is not merely to give someone another place to post an essay.
It is to help worthwhile research become something people can actually find, understand, cite, challenge, and return to later.
Yes, contributors can use AI
sherafy.com is an AI-native publication.
We use AI extensively in research, analysis, document review, drafting, data work, verification, editing, and other parts of the publishing process.
Contributors are welcome to do the same.
We do not consider “Did a human manually type every sentence?” a useful measure of authorship.
The more important questions are:
Did you direct the investigation?
Do you understand the evidence?
Did you make the important judgments?
Can you explain why the article reaches its conclusions?
Are you willing to take responsibility for the work published under your name?
AI can assist with authorship.
It cannot assume responsibility for it.
That remains with the contributor.
The two systems are intentionally connected
These two pages solve different parts of the same problem.
If you have the question:
Send us the claim, document, video, study, statistic, or mystery and tell us what you think needs investigating.
If you want to help answer questions:
Learn about contributing to sherafy.com →
Read how the contributor program works and, if the approach fits how you think, apply through the contributor page.
You can also do both.
A reader might submit a research request today, notice another unanswered question next month, and eventually decide they would rather investigate some of these questions themselves.
That is exactly the kind of participation we want to make easier.
And readers can challenge the finished work too
Participation does not end when an article is published.
sherafy.com articles now also include a Challenge this article system that lets readers dispute factual claims, evidence, missing context, interpretations, outdated information, and privacy issues.
That means the broader research loop increasingly looks like this:
Someone notices a question.
The question gets investigated.
The evidence gets published.
Other readers can inspect the sources.
And if somebody finds better evidence, they can challenge the result.
That is much closer to how a useful research publication should work than simply publishing an article and treating it as finished forever.
You can learn more in our Challenge an Article guide.
What we are trying to build
sherafy.com started primarily as a place to preserve research and answers to questions that were difficult to find elsewhere.
As the site has grown, the obvious next step is to make it easier for more people to participate in finding those questions and improving the answers.
You do not need to become a contributor to help.
A good research request can lead us toward evidence we would otherwise never have examined.
A reader who catches a bad source can improve an existing article.
A subject-matter expert can explain something our research team misunderstood.
And someone with no publishing history at all may find the court filing, dataset, study, contradiction, or overlooked fact that turns into an important piece of research.
The internet already has more than enough content.
What remains valuable are good questions, strong evidence, and people willing to follow the connection between them.
If you have the question, send it.
If you want to help answer it, come investigate with us.
Research Requests: Submit something sherafy.com should investigate
Contributor Program: Learn how to contribute to sherafy.com
