Editorial Standards

Everything the register publishes has to say how it is known. That is the whole standard, and the rest of this page is the procedure that makes it work on a site that has an archive, a set of arithmetic tools and no film in the drawer.

The three kinds of statement

A statement in the register is one of three things. An archived statement is a sentence or a figure read in a capture of the material that traded on this domain, and it is reported with the capture and never generalized past what it says. An arithmetic statement is a result computed from inputs that are named, and it is published with those inputs so that a reader can change them. A measured statement is a figure taken from an object in the hand, and the register has none to publish at this date.

The third category is the important one to keep empty. A plausible number in a cell that reads like a measurement is worse than an empty cell, because it ends a question that was never answered. The rows of the spec table carry their kind in the same cell as the figure, so a reader never has to guess which of the three they are holding.

What counts as evidence, and what does not

A capture counts. A memory of a product, an account of a purchase, a listing copied from a retailer's page and a description of a similar product do not count, and the desk declines to build on them. Where the archive is silent, the register writes that the record is silent, in the page concerned and not only in a footnote.

Arithmetic counts only with its inputs. The mass of a strip of film is a figure only as long as the area and the density that produced it travel with it, and any page of the register that repeats the figure repeats the conditions. The desk treats a number without conditions as a claim, and claims are what the register exists to replace.

How a correction is handled

A correction arrives at the address given in write to the desk. The desk reads the evidence offered and compares it with the evidence behind the figure. Three outcomes are possible. The figure holds, and nothing changes. The figure holds with narrower conditions, and the conditions are rewritten. The figure does not hold, and the row is replaced by the corrected figure with a new date, the reason for the change being recorded in the note of the page concerned.

No row is quietly rewritten. A reader who has quoted the register is owed the knowledge that the register has moved, and a date is the shortest way of saying so. The dates in the table are read as the last time the row was examined, not as the first time it was written.

What the prose is allowed to do

Reasoning appears in the register, clearly marked as reasoning. Where a design, a price list or a code suggests an explanation, the desk may offer it as a reading, in the conditional, and no further. What it may not do is promote a reading to a fact by repeating it without the conditional, which is how a site acquires a history it never had.

The same rule covers the archive. The catalogue that traded on this domain is reported as it reads, and where its claims go past what can be checked, the register reports the claim as a claim. The desk is not the catalogue, does not stand behind it, and does not inherit it.

How the desk is accountable

The register names no author and no organization, which makes accountability a matter of procedure rather than of person: the procedure is public, the evidence behind every figure is named in the page that uses it, and a reader who shows a row to be wrong can watch it change with a date. The desk that applies the procedure is described in about the desk, and the rows it maintains are in the spec table.