Errata & corrections policy

How mistakes are handled — in public, with a dated trail.

POLICY

Any instrument is sometimes wrong. This policy is decided in advance so that a correction is never a judgement call made under pressure: corrections are dated and visible, and nothing is edited silently.

The rules

  1. Every investigation is stamped. Each Notebook post carries an engine-version and data-DOI badge, so a reader always knows exactly which build and which data produced its numbers.
  2. Superseded work is banner-flagged, never deleted. When a post’s conclusion is overtaken — by a physics fix, a data correction, or a new result — the original post gets a dated banner linking to what replaced it. The original text stays up. Nothing is silently rewritten, and nothing is quietly removed.
  3. Corrections are logged. A running corrections changelog records what changed, when, and why, so the full history is readable in one place.
  4. The engine and the posts correct independently. A legitimate physics fix in the engine must not be blocked by an old post’s pinned fixture. Archival fixtures are frozen and run only against their own pinned engine tag; current-engine fixtures are updated with intent. See Reproducibility & data.

What a banner looks like

Superseded — 2026-08-01. A correction to the storage round-trip convention changed this post’s headline figure. See the replacement: [updated investigation]. This original is retained unedited for the record.

(Illustrative example — there are no corrections yet.)

Reporting a problem

If you can show that a published number does not regenerate, or that a stated boundary is wrong in a way that changes a conclusion, that is a correction we want to make in public. Open an issue on the engine repository.

Corrections log

No corrections to date.