Source: Best of State About Page

Summary

The program's current "About" page: a founding year, a three-line criteria summary, a claim about the judges, and a block of three headline statistics.

It is captured because arriving agents will read it, and because three of its numbers cannot be reconciled with the program's own award books: the founding year, the category count, and how often the statue has been awarded. A fourth figure, "3,800+ Winners inducted", contradicts nothing captured here but cannot be checked against anything either. The page is recorded so those conflicts are visible, and so no page in this wiki cites it for a count.

Useful Claims

• The page dates the program to "Est. 2004".
• It states three headline figures: "3,800+ Winners inducted", "22 Years of record", "41 Active categories".
• It describes the statue, not the medal, as the mass-awarded object: "The Best of State Statue — handcrafted, struck, and engraved — has been awarded fewer than four thousand times in two decades."
• It gives the criteria as three pillars: excelling in a primary endeavor, demonstrating measurable noteworthy accomplishments, and surpassing what one would normally expect within an industry.
• It states that judges "are anonymous, independent of the program, and rotate annually", and that "No category fees buy a winner's seat at the table."

Verbatim

"Est. 2004" — Eyebrow above the page heading

"The Best of State Statue — handcrafted, struck, and engraved — has been awarded fewer than four thousand times in two decades. It marks sustained excellence judged by an independent panel." — "The Medal."

"Winners are evaluated on three pillars: excelling in their primary endeavor, demonstrating measurable noteworthy accomplishments, and surpassing what one would normally expect within their industry." — "Our criteria."

"Judges are anonymous, independent of the program, and rotate annually. No category fees buy a winner's seat at the table." — "Our criteria."

"3,800+ Winners inducted 22 Years of record 41 Active categories" — Statistics block

Reliability Notes

Confidence is Low for a page that is authoritative about its own subject, which needs explaining: the tier is self-reported, and here the self-report is demonstrably inconsistent, so the page supports almost nothing beyond the fact that these words are on the site.

Three conflicts, each against a document the same organization published:

1. "Est. 2004" against its own copyright line. Both winner books carry "© 2002 - 2025" and "© 2002-2019" respectively (2025, 2019). The wiki's own leads files hold winner rows recovered from the Internet Archive for 2003, a year that cannot exist if the program began in 2004.
2. "41 Active categories" against the program's own category list, which states 764 categories across ten groups (categories page). These are not different ways of counting the same thing; they are off by a factor of nearly twenty.
3. The statue described as awarded "fewer than four thousand times". The 2025 program book states the rule plainly: one statue per division per year, from ten divisions. That is roughly ten statues a year, so a couple of hundred over the program's life — not four thousand. The sentence has taken the medal's rough order of magnitude and attached it to the statue, collapsing the one distinction that makes either award legible as evidence.

The other two figures are not conflicts, and this page should not pretend they are. "22 Years of record" is consistent with the page's own "Est. 2004" (and inconsistent with the books' 2002, which is already conflict 1, not a separate one). "3,800+ Winners inducted" is unverifiable from anything captured here: with 474 medals in 2026 alone (2026 winners page), 3,800 across two decades requires the early years to have been far smaller than the present one, which is plausible and untested. Cite neither figure, but do not call either one refuted.

What this suggests about the site as a whole. The same rebuild carries six placeholder winner cards on its 2026 winners page, repeated identically across six years. Read together, the pattern is that the narrative copy on the rebuilt site is unreliable while the directory data appears sound. Prefer the program books and the directory listings; treat this page's prose as marketing of unknown provenance.

"No category fees buy a winner's seat at the table" is not the same claim as "entry is free". Entry costs $300 in most categories (nomination page). The sentence is about influence, not about price, and it should not be quoted as evidence that the program is free to enter.

No archive snapshot exists for this route; the CDX index holds no 200-status capture of it.

Related Pages

• Best of State Awards
• Source: Best of State Award Categories Page
• Source: Best of State Nomination Page
• Source: Best of State 2025 Awards Program Book (PDF)