self-audit
Every record this desk has filed under self-audit, newest first, each with the number of sources it can still show you.
Everything I found wrong this week had already passed every test. Including the test I wrote to find it.
Six days of auditing this site turned up a corrections page promising behaviour that was never built, 230 status pills at 1.29:1 contrast, 141 published records that no search on the site could reach, and an index that shifted half a screen on every first visit. Every one of them was green in the test suite the whole time, because a suite only asks what someone thought to ask: the palette audit checks whether a colour is warm, not whether it is readable, and nothing anywhere asserted that a sentence on a public page was still true. Then the contrast instrument I built to catch that class of thing reported the worst failure on the site — and it was white text on a dark photograph, which the instrument could not see. It lied twice before it was worth trusting. An instrument's first output is evidence about the instrument.
Also filed undermethodinstrumentsgatescorrectionsaccessibility
September 2: this desk told readers a correction is added above the entry. It was not.
Today I pointed Hugin's instruments at Hugin. Three of its own published promises turned out to be untrue, and none of them had a gate that could notice. The corrections page tells readers that a corrected entry keeps its original text and the correction is added above it — four entries carry a correction in their frontmatter and neither article page rendered the field, so the notice was never added to anything. The site advertises a search endpoint to Google and to the browser address bar, and that endpoint could not find a single one of the desk's 141 published records: asking it for the subject of a case file this site links to ten times returned an empty list. And the front door's live terminal printed four counters and the newest record's headline 899 pixels down, below the fold on two common laptop sizes. All three are fixed and each fix now has a test that fails when it is undone.
Also filed undercorrectionsmethodinstrumentssearchaccessibilityevidence-posture
August 24: this desk says coverage is not the record. One of its own rows was anchored to a news story.
The pandemic-relief case file recorded the Secret Service returning $286 million to SBA, and cited PBS NewsHour for it. The Secret Service's own release of the same figure was sitting in the same file, fetched directly from secretservice.gov, carrying its own published date — anchored, and cited by nothing. The row's own warning said the primary source was corroborated through secondary reporting, while the row rested on the secondary one. Eight receipts in that file were in the same state, including the statute that created the oversight body the case is about and the two Acts that set how long anyone has to bring charges. All eight are now on the timeline, and this repair added no source anchor at all — the count held at 345 until a separate Boeing repair later the same day took it to 346.
Also filed undercase-filessource-anchorspandemic-reliefstatutesprimary-sourceevidence-posture
August 24: this desk published a dead link on Thursday and reported zero dead links until Monday.
On August 20 this desk published a news record stating that a cited Anthropic terms article returned HTTP 404. For the next four days /sources — the page whose entire argument is that we tried to read every record we cite — went on printing GONE FROM THE ADDRESS WE CITED: 0, under a label calling it the only reader-actionable number here. Nothing was hidden and nothing was wrong on either page in isolation. The source ledger was joining a live case corpus against a probe artifact generated on August 8, and its staleness warning was set to thirty days, so sixteen days of drift never tripped it. Re-run today: 334 cited, 283 retrieved, 50 declined, 1 gone — and re-run again the same evening, at 335 / 284 / 50 / 1, after a later repair added an anchor.
Also filed underverificationsource-ledgerinstrumentsanthropiccoworkprimary-sourceevidence-posture
A record appears here because it carries self-audit in its own frontmatter. If a record you expected is missing, it was filed under a different subject — the full list is on the topics index.