Corrections

Why this page is empty, and what would fill it

It is empty because nothing published here has yet been shown to be wrong. That is the only reason. There is no second index of quiet fixes, no archive of corrections we decided were too small to print, and nothing has been removed from this page since it was made.

An empty dated index is worth something because it can only be spent once. The day a correction is issued, the sentence above is replaced by that correction and by every one after it, and the created-on date stays where it is so that anyone can see how long the page stood empty and how long it did not.

We think the more useful commitment is the one about what happens next rather than the one about our record so far. If you find an error on any page here, it will be corrected in public, with a date, in terms that describe the error rather than obscure it, whether or not anyone else would have noticed.

What a correction looks like here

A correction notice on this site has three parts and no fourth part. It opens with the word Correction and the full date. It then states what the page originally said, in a sentence beginning This article originally. It then states what the page says now. The wrong version is described even though it is no longer displayed, because a reader who acted on the wrong version needs to know which sentence they are holding.

There is no apology paragraph, no explanation of how busy we were, and no passive construction hiding who wrote the error. There is one author on this site and every error on it is his.

The notice appears in two places at once and stays in both: at the top of the corrected page, permanently, and here, newest first. A correction also bumps the corrected page’s version number and produces a dated entry in the change log. Nothing is ever fixed silently.

What counts as a correction, and what does not

A correction is a factual error: a misquoted provision, a wrong citation, a wrong number, a wrong date, a claim attributed to a document that does not contain it, or a conclusion that the sources do not support. Anything that would change what a reader took away from the page is a correction, including an error in a table cell or a source line.

Not a correction, but still logged: new material, a re-verified register row, a figure updated to a newer collection year, a rule renumbered by its issuing agency, or a conclusion changed by new evidence. Those are revisions. They get a version bump and a dated entry in the change log, and where a conclusion changed, the entry says which conclusion and why.

Not logged at all: a typographical fix, a repaired internal link, a stylesheet change. Logging those would bury the entries that matter under entries that do not, which is its own way of hiding a correction.

Where a whole page is superseded, it keeps its address and gains a notice pointing forward. Pages are not deleted here. A wrong sentence that is deleted rather than corrected goes on circulating in the places that copied it, detached from anything a reader can check — which is most of what is wrong with the published record on this subject, and not a habit we intend to add to.

How to tell us something is wrong

Write to corrections@biodrainmedical.com. A mailbox that is read is the whole mechanism; there is no form, no ticket number and no account.

What helps, in rough order of how much it helps:

• The page title and the date printed in its metadata block, so we know which version you read.
• The sentence you think is wrong, quoted, so we are looking at the same words.
• The document that shows it is wrong — a citation is enough, a link is better, and the section or page number inside the document is best of all. We will retrieve it ourselves rather than take the summary.

We aim to answer within five working days and to publish a documented correction within seven. If you are right we will say so in public. If we cannot establish either way, we will say that in public too, on the page in question, rather than leave the sentence standing unmarked.

Credit is yours to decline. Corrections are published whether or not the person who found the error wants their name on it, and we will not print a name without being asked to.

Elsewhere on this site

• Editorial standards

  The full correction policy, the sourcing rules, the certainty ladder, and the closed status vocabularies used in the registers and the claims ledger.

• Change log

  Every substantive revision to any page here, dated, newest first — including every correction, cross-listed.

• How we work, and where this could be wrong

  How topics are chosen, how a claim is traced, how the registers are built, and the errors this method is most likely to make.