Corrections

This page is empty because nothing has been published yet. It exists anyway, from the first day, because a corrections page created after the first embarrassing error is a press release, and a corrections page that predates the first article is a policy.

The policy

Everything on this site is written from records, and records get misread. When that happens here, four things happen in this order:

1. The page is fixed.
2. A dated note is appended to the bottom of the page saying what it used to say and what changed.
3. An entry is added to the log below.
4. Whoever reported it is credited by name, unless they asked not to be.

What does not happen: silent edits to a factual claim, deleting a page to make an error disappear, or changing a published date to make a correction look like an original. If a claim was wrong for eight months, the record says it was wrong for eight months.

How errors are classified

Typo

Spelling, grammar, a broken link, a formatting fault. Fixed on sight, not logged. Nothing a reader believed was affected.

Clarification

What was written was defensible but was read the wrong way by more than one person. The wording changes; the claim does not. Logged.

Correction

A factual claim was wrong — a date, a version, a name, a base, a number, an attribution. Fixed, noted on the page, logged, and if the claim also lived in a Register row, that row is fixed the same day.

Retraction

The central claim of a piece does not hold. The piece stays online, with the retraction stated at the top of it above everything else, and the reasoning that failed left visible. Nothing is quietly unpublished.

Staleness is not an error, but it is a debt

Half the claims on a site like this have a shelf life. A distribution that was shipping in August is not necessarily shipping in March. Every article carries a last verified date in the rail and a Standing block that separates what is still true from what has ended and what is now actively wrong; the Register carries a verified date in every row.

A page that has gone stale has not been corrected, it has been neglected — so re-verification passes are logged here too, marked as such, so you can see when something was last actually looked at rather than last touched.

The log

No entries. Nothing has been published, so nothing has been wrong yet. Entries will appear here newest first, each with its date, the page affected, its class, and what changed.

Reporting an error

Write to editor@lxnaydesign.net. Useful mail names the page and the sentence. Mail that also names a source is better, and mail that names a source contradicting me is the most valuable mail this site gets — but a plain “this doesn’t sound right” is welcome too. Chasing down the source is my job.

If you would rather not be credited, say so and you will not be. If you would like to be credited under a handle rather than a name, that works too.