Corrections policy
This site rates other people's claims, so it has to be correctable itself. Anyone can report an error, including the claimants I have rated. Corrections are made in the page where the error was published, dated, and described rather than silently swapped in.
Who can report an error
Anyone. There is no form to qualify for and no relationship required. The people most likely to find an error here are the claimants whose pages I wrote, and they are the people I most want to hear from. A correction from someone who disagrees with my rating is still a correction.
Reports go through the contact page. You do not need to say what you want changed, only what is wrong.
What counts as an error
Four things, in descending order of how fast I will act:
- A factual error. A wrong date, a misspelled name, a misattributed quote, a venue that is not the venue, a number that does not match the source. These get fixed as soon as I can confirm them.
- A broken or moved source. A citation that no longer resolves, or resolves to something other than what I cited. Either the link is repaired or the claim that rested on it is withdrawn.
- A rating that does not follow the rubric. If the methodology and the rating on a page disagree, the rating is wrong. This is the report I take most seriously, because it is the one that says my own standard convicts me.
- New evidence. A document that did not exist or that I did not find, which changes what the record supports. The rating changes with it, upward or downward.
What is not an error
Disagreeing with a conclusion the evidence supports is not an error, and I will say so plainly rather than pretend to be persuaded. A request to remove an accurate, sourced statement because it is unflattering is not a correction request. Where the disagreement is about judgement rather than fact, I will publish the objection alongside the rating instead of quietly deleting either.
Time
A factual error that I can verify from a source you give me: within 48 hours of my confirming it. An error that needs me to find and read sources of my own: within 7 days. A rating dispute, which may require re-reading the whole page against the rubric: within 14 days, with an acknowledgement inside 48 hours so you know it was not ignored.
If something will take longer than that, the page says so while it is pending, rather than looking settled while it is not.
How a correction is recorded
Corrections happen in place. The URL does not change, the page is not deleted and replaced, and the old claim is not scrubbed as though it had never been published. Specifically:
- The corrected page keeps its URL and gets a new modification date, which is taken from the commit that made the change rather than typed by hand.
- Where the correction changes the meaning of something a reader may already have seen or cited, the page states what it previously said and what changed.
- Where a rating changes, both the old and the new rating are named, so that anyone who quoted the old one can see what happened.
- The full edit history of every page is public in the repository behind this site, commit by commit. I cannot revise the record without leaving a trace, and that is deliberate.
Withdrawals
If a page turns out to rest on a source that does not hold up, the honest move is to withdraw the finding rather than soften the wording. A withdrawn rating is marked as withdrawn on the page, with the reason, and is not removed from the site. Nothing here gets to disappear because it became inconvenient.
Why this exists
A site that grades claims by whether they are checkable owes its readers the same thing it demands. The rubric says an outside account counts for more than a self-published one; this page is the mechanism by which outside accounts get to act on this site. Who publishes it and who pays for it is in about.