📓 The record

Mistakes

This is every mistake The Aporia knows it has made: what a reader would have seen, when it started, when it was noticed, and how long it took to fix.

It is here because the about page promises it. A site that asks you to weigh up other people's reliability has to publish its own record, including the parts that are unflattering, and especially the interval between finding a problem and fixing it.

Nothing has been recorded here yet. That is not a claim that no mistakes have been made. This project measures publishers partly by how often they correct themselves, and it treats an empty correction record as an open question rather than a clean one, because a record can be empty when nobody is checking. The same reading applies here, and it applies to a project of one person more than most.

The table appears as soon as there is a first entry, and entries are not removed once made.

What gets recorded. Something this project got wrong that a reader could have seen and acted on: a measurement computed the wrong way, a page that stated something untrue, a signal published when it should have been withheld. Not every bug — a crash nobody saw and a slow query are not on this page. The test is whether somebody who trusted the site was misled by it.

Why three dates and not one. "A correction was published" says nothing about how long the wrong thing was live, or how long it sat known-broken before anyone fixed it. Those two intervals are the ones that say whether a project is actually careful, so they are columns rather than something a reader has to reconstruct. Where a start date is an estimate it is the honest estimate rather than the flattering one, and where a mistake was found by somebody else the Noticed column says "not recorded" rather than implying it was found in-house.

Kinds. Data — wrong or missing data; Method — a measurement computed the wrong way; Copy — a page that said something untrue; Access — something readers could not reach.

All times are UTC. Entries are never deleted or edited after the fact except to add the date a mistake was fixed.

💬 Give feedback
🕘 History 🎫 Support