Editorial standards

Where the data comes from

Mob Tennis is built on three sources, each with a specific role:

• Live scores, schedules, and tournament metadata — api-tennis.com. A paid feed, polled and streamed for real-time updates.
• Historical match data, player records, and rankings — Jeff Sackmann's open tennis_atp and tennis_wta CSV repositories. The canonical reference for tour history.
• Tournament draw structure, player bios, tournament blurbs — Wikipedia. Bracket pages are parsed nightly for ongoing top-tier events; biographies and tournament summaries come from Wikipedia articles and Wikidata.
• News and video highlights — public RSS feeds and the YouTube Data API, ingested every few minutes and matched to players and tournaments by name.

How the prose is written

The vast majority of the writing on this site is templated, not generated by an AI. Editorial paragraphs on head-to-head pages, player snapshots, tournament summaries, and match previews/recaps are composed from the underlying data using a small library of sentence variants chosen deterministically by the page's identifier — so the same page always reads the same way on every visit, while two similar pages don't read identical.

The one exception is the weekly editorial digest, which is generated by Claude Haiku once per week from a tightly-scoped fact sheet (the finals played, the notable upsets, the headline events still in progress). The model is instructed never to invent matches, scores, or players, and is constrained to a structured response format. Every digest is reviewable in the archive at /digest.

Accuracy and corrections

Scores, draws, and rankings are updated automatically from the feeds above. Live scoring can lag the broadcast by 10–30 seconds, and third-party feeds occasionally publish errors that propagate to the site before we catch them. Bracket reconciliation between providers (Wikipedia's draw vs. api-tennis's live results) sometimes produces a stale row for a few minutes before the live consumer adopts it.

When you spot something wrong — a wrong score, a wrong winner, a player on the wrong side of the draw, prose that's clearly off — open an issue on GitHub. A URL and a one-line description is plenty. We don't silently patch — when historical data changes, the change is in the public commit log.

Independence

Mob Tennis isn't affiliated with the ATP, the WTA, the ITF, or any individual tournament. We don't accept paid placements, sponsored coverage, or affiliate partnerships that would steer editorial choices. Advertising on the site is run through arm's-length networks (currently documented in our privacy policy); ad sales have no input into what the site says about a player, tournament, or result.

Profits, after hosting costs, are routed to the Tennis Association of Iceland for junior development — see About for the full arrangement.