2026-09-27News

Every number on the site now has to have a quotation behind it

The quotation check proves an excerpt is genuine. It never proved that a number we stated was one of the things quoted. Now something does.

This site has always required that a quotation be a literal substring of the stored reading of the source it is attributed to. That catches a paraphrase passed off as an excerpt, which was the failure that produced most of the errors in the first country we wrote.

It does not catch a different thing: a threshold, a fee or a period stated as a fact where the quotations on that same record happen not to contain it. The number can be right and rest on nothing, and the check stays green. Four money figures passed that way on one of the first research runs.

There is now a second check. Every figure stated in a key fact must appear in one of the quotations on the same record, or carry a note saying where it came from and that it has not been traced to an instrument. Of the figures on the site today, the great majority are carried by a quotation and the rest are marked.

Writing the check was harder than it sounds and it was wrong in both directions before it was right. It counted law numbers and dates as quantities. It matched a bare 2 inside an unrelated list of article numbers and called three different two-year rules confirmed. It did not know the balboa, the colón or the peso, so every Panamanian money figure read as unbacked even where the quotation beside it contained it. Each of those was found by a real record rather than by reading the code.