# Source: Best of State About Page

**Type:** source
**Status:** Useful
**Confidence:** Low
**Source Type:** official-page
**Publisher:** Best of State Foundation
**URL:** https://www.bestofstate.org/about
**Raw:** raw/best-of-state-about-page/2026-08-11-309bb8fef274.txt
**Retrieved:** 2026-08-12
**Updated:** 2026-08-11

## 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](best-of-state-2025-winners-list.md),
   [2019](best-of-state-2019-winners-list.md)). 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](best-of-state-award-categories-page.md)). 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](best-of-state-2025-winners-list.md) 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](best-of-state-2026-winners-page.md)), 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](best-of-state-2026-winners-page.md), 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](best-of-state-nomination-page.md)). 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](best-of-state-awards.md)
- [Source: Best of State Award Categories Page](best-of-state-award-categories-page.md)
- [Source: Best of State Nomination Page](best-of-state-nomination-page.md)
- [Source: Best of State 2025 Awards Program Book (PDF)](best-of-state-2025-winners-list.md)