diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dbe5a60
--- /dev/null
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+# Changelog
+
+## [0.1.1] - 2026-09-XX
+
+### Fixed
+- Clearer error message when `Auditor.audit()` is called from a top-level
+  script on Windows without an `if __name__ == "__main__":` guard, instead
+  of an unreadable recursive multiprocessing crash.
+- Added missing `Programming Language :: Python :: 3.12` classifier
+  (CI already tested against 3.12; PyPI metadata was incomplete).
+
+### Documentation
+- README Python examples now include the required `__main__` guard, with
+  an explanation of why it's needed.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 4a12464..82c43cc 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -1,6 +1,11 @@
 # inference-audit
 
-An NLP dataset quality auditor. Run one command, get a reproducible report covering five quality checks and an overall score.This pip installable python library is built so a dataset that scores well is something you can actually cite as evidence of quality, not just a number.
+[![PyPI](https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/inference-audit-pk)](https://pypi.org/project/inference-audit-pk/)
+[![Python](https://img.shields.io/pypi/pyversions/inference-audit-pk)](https://pypi.org/project/inference-audit-pk/)
+[![CI](https://github.com/Inference-LAB/inference-audit/actions/workflows/ci.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/Inference-LAB/inference-audit/actions)
+[![License: MIT](https://img.shields.io/badge/License-MIT-yellow.svg)](LICENSE)
+
+An NLP dataset quality auditor. Run one command, get a reproducible report covering five quality checks and an overall score. This pip installable python library is built so a dataset that scores well is something you can actually cite as evidence of quality, not just a number.
 
 ```
 pip install inference-audit-pk
@@ -10,6 +15,10 @@ pip install inference-audit-pk
 
 Every stage of an NLP pipeline from publishing a dataset, choosing one for training , depends on quality that's usually checked with a one-off script written from scratch each time, producing results that aren't comparable across projects or papers. `inference-audit` replaces that with a standard, versioned, reproducible check anyone can run and cite.
 
+## A note on the Python examples below
+
+Every Python example in this README is wrapped in `if __name__ == "__main__":`. This is required on Windows, not a style choice: `language_contamination` uses a process pool internally for performance, and Windows has no `fork()`, so it re-imports your entry script to create each worker process. Without the guard, that re-import re-triggers your top-level code, causing a runtime error. If you're calling `Auditor.audit()` from inside a function (e.g. in a larger application) rather than a bare top-level script, the guard is not needed there — it only matters for code sitting directly at module level in the file you run.
+
 ## Quickstart
 
 ### Default usage
@@ -19,11 +28,12 @@ The simplest case — audits a dataset using the five checks with default settin
 ```python
 from inference_audit import Auditor
 
-auditor = Auditor()
-report = auditor.audit("dataset.csv", label_col="emotion", text_col="text")
+if __name__ == "__main__":
+    auditor = Auditor()
+    report = auditor.audit("dataset.csv", label_col="emotion", text_col="text")
 
-report.save("audit_report.html")     # human-readable, self-contained HTML
-report.to_json("audit_report.json")  # machine-readable, for CI pipelines
+    report.save("audit_report.html")     # human-readable, self-contained HTML
+    report.to_json("audit_report.json")  # machine-readable, for CI pipelines
 ```
 
 ```bash
@@ -46,10 +56,15 @@ inference-audit run dataset.csv `
 If your dataset includes an annotation confidence or agreement score per row, pass it in to enable the `annotation_consistency` check — otherwise this check is silently skipped rather than scored.
 
 ```python
-report = auditor.audit(
-    "dataset.csv", label_col="emotion", text_col="text",
-    conf_col="confidence",
-)
+from inference_audit import Auditor
+
+if __name__ == "__main__":
+    auditor = Auditor()
+    report = auditor.audit(
+        "dataset.csv", label_col="emotion", text_col="text",
+        conf_col="confidence",
+    )
+    report.save("audit_report.html")
 ```
 
 ```bash
@@ -74,10 +89,15 @@ inference-audit run dataset.csv `
 `language_contamination` defaults to flagging English/Hindi as contamination risks. If your dataset has a different realistic contamination risk (e.g. an English dataset where French or Spanish leakage is the actual concern), override the default rather than relying on it.
 
 ```python
-report = auditor.audit(
-    "dataset.csv", label_col="label", text_col="text",
-    concern_languages=("fr", "es"),
-)
+from inference_audit import Auditor
+
+if __name__ == "__main__":
+    auditor = Auditor()
+    report = auditor.audit(
+        "dataset.csv", label_col="label", text_col="text",
+        concern_languages=("fr", "es"),
+    )
+    report.save("audit_report.html")
 ```
 
 ```bash
@@ -131,11 +151,14 @@ Each check returns a score (0–100), an optional warning, and detailed metrics.
 | `--concern-languages` | No | Comma-separated ISO 639-1 codes to flag if detected (default: `en,hi`) |
 | `--fail-below` | No | Exit with code 1 if the overall score is below this value (0–100) |
 
+The CLI does not require the `if __name__ == "__main__":` guard — that's already handled internally.
+
 ## Known Limitations
 
 - **Language detection has no real signal for some languages.** The underlying detection library has no language profile for some languages (Roman Urdu being a notable example), so `language_contamination` doesn't attempt to identify "the dataset's language" — it only flags confident detections of specific languages on a configurable concern list. Text in an undetectable language can still occasionally be misdetected as a concern-list language (measured false-positive rate: roughly 10–12% on real Roman Urdu test data) — this is a bounded, documented limitation, not a bug.
 - **Performance on very large datasets.** Recent optimizations (deduplication before comparison, parallelized language detection) significantly improved runtime on large datasets, but `near_duplicates` and `language_contamination` remain the two most compute-intensive checks. On datasets over 100K rows, a full audit can still take up to several minutes (up to ~5 minutes observed on a 100K+ row real-world dataset) depending on text diversity and duplication rate. If you're auditing a very large corpus, expect these two checks to dominate total runtime.
 - **`--concern-languages` defaults to English/Hindi.** This is a reasonable general-purpose default, particularly for code-switched or Roman-script corpora where English/Hindi leakage is a common risk — but it is not universally correct. If you're auditing a dataset with a different realistic contamination risk, override this flag rather than relying on the default.
+- **On Windows, the Python API requires an `if __name__ == "__main__":` guard** when called from a top-level script, due to how `language_contamination`'s process pool is created without `fork()` support. See the note above the Quickstart section. The CLI is unaffected.
 
 ## Example Output
 
@@ -175,7 +198,7 @@ MIT — see [LICENSE](LICENSE).
 
 ## Authors
 
-Built as part of the Inference Lab Engineering Fellowship, Cohort 01 — Project C.
+Built as part of the INFERENCE Lab Engineering Fellowship, Cohort 01 — Project C.
 
 - **Khadija Faisal** (Lead Engineer) — [GitHub](https://github.com/khadijja1) · [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/khadijjafaisal)
-- **Muhammad Shoaib Altaf** (Research & Implementation Engineer) — [GitHub](https://github.com/Shoaib-Altaf) · [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/muhammad-shoaib-altaf-6ab3a8326)
\ No newline at end of file
+- **Muhammad Shoaib Altaf** (Research & Implementation Engineer) — [GitHub](https://github.com/Shoaib-Altaf) · [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/muhammad-shoaib-altaf-6ab3a8326)
diff --git a/inference_audit/checks/language_contamination.py b/inference_audit/checks/language_contamination.py
index 8f8a3fe..30bd2af 100644
--- a/inference_audit/checks/language_contamination.py
+++ b/inference_audit/checks/language_contamination.py
@@ -150,11 +150,23 @@ def check_language_contamination(
     # --- Improvement 2: run those per-unique-text detections in
     # parallel across CPU cores when there are enough of them to make
     # the process-pool overhead worthwhile. Each detection is fully
-    # independent of every other, so this is embarrassingly parallel. ---
+    # independent of every other, so this is embarrassingly parallel.
+    # clear error for Windows multiprocessing guard issue ---
     if len(unique_texts) >= _PARALLEL_THRESHOLD:
         max_workers = min(32, (os.cpu_count() or 4))
-        with ProcessPoolExecutor(max_workers=max_workers, initializer=_init_worker) as executor:
-            results = list(executor.map(_detect_one, unique_texts, chunksize=200))
+        try:
+            with ProcessPoolExecutor(max_workers=max_workers, initializer=_init_worker) as executor:
+                results = list(executor.map(_detect_one, unique_texts, chunksize=200))
+        except RuntimeError as e:
+            if "bootstrapping phase" in str(e):
+                raise RuntimeError(
+                "language_contamination uses multiprocessing for performance on "
+                "large datasets. On Windows, calling Auditor.audit() from a "
+                "top-level script requires wrapping your code in "
+                "`if __name__ == '__main__':`. See the README's Quickstart "
+                "section for a working example."
+            ) from e
+            raise
     else:
         results = [_detect_one(t) for t in unique_texts]
 
diff --git a/pyproject.toml b/pyproject.toml
index 70b1a86..62eaf1e 100644
--- a/pyproject.toml
+++ b/pyproject.toml
@@ -4,12 +4,13 @@ build-backend = "setuptools.build_meta"
 
 [project]
 name = "inference-audit-pk"
-version = "0.1.0"
+version = "0.1.1"
 description = "NLP dataset quality auditor: label distribution, near-duplicates, language contamination, missing values, and annotation consistency checks in one command."
 readme = "README.md"
 requires-python = ">=3.9"
 license = {file = "LICENSE"}
 authors = [
+    {name = "INFERENCE Lab"},
     {name = "Khadija Faisal"},
     {name = "Muhammad Shoaib Altaf"},
 ]
@@ -30,6 +31,7 @@ classifiers = [
     "Programming Language :: Python :: 3.9",
     "Programming Language :: Python :: 3.10",
     "Programming Language :: Python :: 3.11",
+    "Programming Language :: Python :: 3.12",
     "Operating System :: OS Independent",
     "Topic :: Scientific/Engineering :: Artificial Intelligence",
 ]