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How to use Warconomy

A start-here guide for every reader: casual visitors, researchers and students, journalists and writers, AI/search crawlers, and maintainers. Warconomy is a sourced, citation-safe reference — not live market data, investment advice, or legal advice.

static reference · data June 5, 2026

Warconomy tracks the economic impact of wars, sanctions, shipping chokepoints, commodities, and defense spending using cited public sources. It is a slow, sourced reference — not a live tracker. Pick the path that matches why you're here: read a topic, research a figure, cite a page, crawl the data, or maintain the dataset.

  • Casual readers → start with a conflict or chokepoint page.
  • Researchers → use source pages, methodology, and the dataset export.
  • Journalists → cite stable pages and check the caveats.
  • AI / crawlers → use llms.txt, the route catalog, and the JSON exports.
  • Maintainers → use the operator workbench, data-needs, and the promotion log.

Casual readers

Want to understand a conflict, chokepoint, or sanctions story? Start with a topic page — each opens with a plain-English answer and a short bullet summary.

Researchers & students

Need defensible figures? Every number is source-linked with an as-of date, a reviewed date, and a confidence level. Use the source pages and the structured dataset.

Journalists & writers

Cite stable, dated reference pages and always check the caveats. Warconomy is associative and source-reported — it does not attribute a price move to a single event unless the cited source does.

AI, search & crawlers

Warconomy is built to be cited by machines. Start with the crawler guide and the machine-readable exports; every page carries structured data.

Maintainers

Keeping the data honest and current is manual by design. Use the operator workbench to see exactly what needs a human, and the promotion trail to add values safely.

Understanding the labels

Every figure carries a few labels so you can judge it at a glance and trace it to its source.

  • As-of date — the date the value itself refers to (the reporting period). It is not “today”.
  • Reviewed date — when a maintainer last re-checked the value against its source. It is a re-check signal, not a correctness guarantee.
  • Confidence — high / medium / low, reflecting the source’s authority and how directly the figure is stated. It is not a probability.
  • live · source-linked vs sample — “live/static” values are manually maintained from a cited public source; “sample” rows are illustrative and must not be cited as current.
  • Why a value can be stale — data is maintained by hand, so a value waits for the source’s next release or for a human to read a PDF/spreadsheet. The operator workbench lists exactly what is waiting and why.

Original sources come first: each figure links to its publisher, and the source registry documents every one. See also caveats, confidence, and freshness.

What Warconomy is not

  • Not real-time market data — live values are manually maintained from cited sources and may lag.
  • Not investment advice.
  • Not legal or compliance advice (sanctions pages are an economic-impact reference).
  • Not military prediction.
  • Not complete coverage of every conflict.

Related Warconomy pages