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Corrections

What happens when we get something wrong, and what the pipeline caught before it reached you.

Key takeaways

  • A correction runs at the top of the piece it corrects, dated, and stays there. We do not silently edit a published figure.
  • Every correction also gets a check, so the same mistake cannot reach a second piece.
  • Nothing is currently under correction. When something is, it appears here.

How a correction works

Three steps, in this order. The piece gets a dated note at the top saying what was wrong and what it now says. This page gets an entry. And the pipeline gets a check that would have stopped it — because a correction that does not change the process is a promise to make the same mistake again.

We do not delete a wrong figure and move on. If a number changed, the note says what it was. If a piece was wrong enough that the argument does not survive, the piece comes down and the entry here says so.

Telling us

Every figure on this site is arithmetic on inputs we print, so the fastest way to show us a mistake is to name the input and the answer you get. Where a piece rests on a published figure, the source is linked in the piece and you can check our figure against theirs directly.

The log

No published piece is currently under correction. Rather than leave that as a bare claim, here is what the pipeline rejected before publication, because it is the same list a corrections log would otherwise be made of: a headline that inflated a $295,000 figure by a factor of a thousand; a draft that linked a real outlet at a URL that had never existed; a percentage describing a share of managers used as though it were a pay rise; a draft that quoted two portfolio figures forty-five per cent apart from incompatible sources; and four pieces built by fusing loosely related feed items, which were written, read, and thrown away. Each one is now a rule in the editorial policy.

Why publish the rejections. Because the alternative is an empty corrections page, which tells a reader nothing about whether anyone is checking.