Two layers that never become one
Official publications provide aggregate context: workload, decisions, applications and institutional updates. Consented Prepiska reports provide case movement. An official national total is never inserted into a community cohort, and a community report is never presented as an official Ministry record.
Evidence labels
- Official: Published by a public authority.
- Document verified: A moderator reviewed redacted supporting material.
- Self-reported: The reporter says it is their own case.
- Secondhand: Reported for another applicant with permission.
- Unverified: Provenance is not strong enough for a higher label.
- Disputed: Credible conflicting information or a moderation concern exists.
What a cohort means
Comparable cases are grouped by legal basis, an available anchor year, filing country and filing channel. Filters can further narrow stage and evidence. Nationality and residence are separate variables and are not silently treated as the same thing as origin or filing office.
Sample protection
Cohort totals stay hidden below 20 distinct anonymous cases. Stage-level counts also require 20 cases. Reported wait ranges require at least 50 usable durations and a sufficiently strong source mix. Published counts are rounded in groups of five.
Wait ranges
Where enough comparable transitions exist, Prepiska reports the middle 60% of observed durations (20th to 80th percentile) and the median. This describes the current sample; it is not an exact prediction for any file.
Duplicates and bad-faith reports
Anonymous case-thread hashes help link multiple updates from one case. Submission fingerprints, rate limits, moderation, disputed labels and minimum sample thresholds reduce manipulation. They cannot prove that every report is true. “How we know this” drawers expose sample size, date period and source mix so a user can judge the signal.
What is not ingested
Prepiska does not scrape the credentialed Ministry tracker, collect tracker PINs, or import Facebook, Telegram or forum posts merely because they are publicly visible. A social post can be valuable evidence, but reuse requires permission and an honest reliability label. The current live feed uses first-party structured reports submitted directly to Prepiska.
Official source layer
Appropriate sources include Presidency citizenship reports, Ministry annual or workload publications, Bulgarian Parliament questions and answers, the Bulgarian open-data portal and Eurostat context. Each source record should include its publisher, canonical URL, period, publication date, licence or permission basis, extraction method and last human review.
Inspect the official data records · Read the privacy architecture