The Corrections List Now Says What Each One Touched

Our Source Corrections page lists every claim we published that turned out to be wrong. Until today, choosing which one to read told you almost nothing. Each card carried a small tag, and on nearly every card that tag said Source Corrections, which is the name of the page you were already standing on.

That tag is gone, and in its place each card now says what the correction actually touched. One of two things: a fact on a page, which a reader could have relied on, or our own machinery, which no reader would have acted on.

Why this is worth a change

Those two are not the same kind of admission, and we had been publishing them as though they were. A wrong production country on a product page is something a person could have made a decision on. A scoring rule that misfired inside our own tooling, caught before it reached a page, is us cleaning our own workshop. Both belong in public. Only one of them changes what a reader should do.

We already made that judgment for every correction on the list, and we already published it. It just sat on the correction’s own page, which you could only reach by picking a correction first. The judgment was there and the moment it was useful was earlier.

What the words are

The sentence on the card is the same sentence the correction’s own page carries. We did not write a shorter version for the card, and we did not invent a badge or a colour to stand in for it. If a phrase is too long for the space, our rule is that the space changes, because the moment you shorten a judgment to fit a slot you have started writing a second, softer version of it.

A correction with no judgment recorded shows no sentence at all. It does not fall back to the gentler of the two. Every correction on the list today carries one.

One more thing on the same cards

Each card also carries a short summary line of what changed, and on nearly all of them that line began with the words Source Correction. Same problem, one line lower. Those opening words are no longer printed on this page. The stored text is untouched, and one older record whose summary opens differently was deliberately left alone rather than have us widen the rule until it matched everything. Widening a rule until it matches is close to the mistake that put several of these corrections on this list in the first place.

Where this applies

On the Source Corrections page only. On the main Lab index, where corrections sit alongside deep dives and lab results, the category tag is doing real work, so it stays. A tag that repeats the heading above it is clutter. The same tag on a mixed page is the thing telling you what you are looking at.