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Corrections

Corrections

A correction is worth more to this site than the appearance of having been right. If something here is wrong — a figure, a legal statement, a claim about a product — the page changes and the change is noted rather than made silently.

The channel

A monitored contact address is not yet published on this site. Stating one that nobody watches would be worse than saying so: a correction sent into an unread inbox is a correction that was never made, and the reader would have no way to tell. When a monitored address exists it will appear here and in the footer.

In the meantime, what does exist is verifiable without contacting anyone. Every dataset carries a visible changelog. Every page carries the date its sources were last re-read, distinct from the date it was last edited. Every quantitative claim carries the source it came from, so a disputed figure can be checked at its origin rather than argued about.

What makes a correction actionable

Four things, and the third is the one most often missing:

  1. The page, and where on it.
  2. What is stated there now.
  3. The source that says otherwise — a primary document rather than a secondary summary, ideally with a date.
  4. Whether the error changes a conclusion or only a detail.

A correction that arrives with a primary source attached is applied. One that arrives as a disagreement about judgement is treated as a disagreement about judgement, which is a different and also useful thing — several pages here already state where the evidence runs out and the editorial inference begins.

How corrections are applied

Material corrections — a figure, a legal statement, a comparison claim — change the page and are recorded. Where the error is in a dataset, the row changes and the dataset changelog gains an entry with the date, which is visible to every reader and appears in the downloadable JSON alongside the data.

Minor corrections such as typography or a dead link are made without a note. Nothing in that category changes a conclusion, and recording them would bury the ones that do.

Silent editing after being wrong makes a source less trustworthy than admitting the error, particularly in comparisons, where a reader has no way to detect the change. That is a rule this site applies to itself rather than a courtesy.

What already carries a changelog

Related

The method page sets out the evaluation criteria and how vendor-stated figures are treated. The data methodology sets out the source hierarchy, the evidence classes and the rules that decide what may be published at all.