Corrections

When we get
something wrong

This site spends a lot of its time on people who never correct anything: the hospital headline that went round the world in an hour and got its correction six days later, the placards still citing a number that four intelligence services disproved. A site that keeps that ledger has to keep its own. Here is what happens when we are the ones who are wrong, and every instance so far.

Everything here is checkable on purpose. That only means something if there is a way to tell us we got it wrong, and a record of what happened when someone did.

We do not silently edit. If a claim changes, the change is logged below with the old wording, the new wording, and why. The point of the log is that you can see what we got wrong, not just that we say we would admit it.

The policy

Short, because it should be.

We check the source, not the sender

A report is judged on the evidence attached to it. It does not matter who sends it or what they think of the rest of the site. A correct correction from a hostile reader is still a correct correction.

The fix and the log ship together

When something is wrong we change the page and add the entry below in the same deploy. There is no window in which the page is quietly right and the record is quietly missing.

We say which kind of wrong it was

A wrong number is not the same as a dead link or a formatting bug, and lumping them together flatters us. Each entry is labelled: factual, sourcing, broken reference, display, duplication.

Weak evidence gets replaced, not deleted

If a claim rests on a source that does not hold, we do not quietly drop the claim and leave a hole. We find whether better evidence exists. Sometimes the replacement is a smaller number, and it goes up anyway.

Corrections are not a scoreboard

An empty log is not a clean record, it is usually an unread site or an unkept one. We would rather the list grow honestly than stay short.

What we will not do

We will not remove a sourced fact because it is unwelcome, and we will not soften a finding to settle an argument. Being corrected and being pressured are different things, and only one of them changes a page.

The log

Every correction made to this site, newest first. Where an error was found by our own audit rather than reported, the entry says so, because the difference matters and hiding it would be its own small dishonesty.

2026-07-28

/wikipedia (wiki: Qasem Soleimani)

https://wiki.ilroot.com/wikipedia/qasem-soleimani/

Factual

Described Soleimani as "tied to 1,000+ American deaths".

603 American service members, the figure in the Pentagon's April 2019 declassified revision, which is 17 percent of every US death in the Iraq war between 2003 and 2011.

The 1,000+ figure had no source and was contradicted by the page's own body text, which said "hundreds". Found in an internal audit, not reported to us. The sourced number is lower and better: it is the US Defense Department's own count, revised upward from the 500 acknowledged in 2015.

2026-07-28

wiki: Al Jazeera

https://wiki.ilroot.com/organizations/al-jazeera/

Sourcing

Cited network.aljazeera.net, the network's own About Us page, for its founding date, structure and audience reach.

Cites Britannica for the founding and the Qatari state funding. The audience and bureau figures are now labelled as the network's own promotional claims, which have never been independently audited.

A subject is not a neutral source for its own history, and this site does not accept that standard from anyone else. Britannica also carries the sharper finding: the network softens its criticism of Qatar, went pro-government on the 2022 World Cup corruption story, and muffled coverage of the blockade of its own owner.

2026-07-28

/wikipedia (audit cards)

https://ilroot.com/wikipedia

Broken reference

An audit card pointed the reader to "Sidelining the watchdog, above" for the ADL reliability ruling.

Links to the page that actually carries that detail.

No card or page by that name exists anywhere on the site. The pointer had never resolved.

2026-07-28

/media (pattern cards)

https://wiki.ilroot.com/media/

Broken reference

Two cards ended with "see the card above", pointing at unrelated neighbouring cards.

The pointers are removed and the claims stand on their own text.

The referenced cards did not discuss the subjects in question. The underlying claims were correct; only the cross-references were wrong.

2026-07-28

Fact-check verdict boxes, 13 pages

https://ilroot.com/conflict

Display

The verdict box on 13 fact-check pages, and the description on 13 glossary entries, were cut off mid-word by a build script, for example "the blast came from a Palesti...".

Each box carries complete sentences, rebuilt from the source text at real sentence boundaries.

A character-count truncation in the page generator. The full text was always present further down the page, but the most-read line on each page was broken. The generator now cuts on sentence or word boundaries and can never cut mid-word again.

2026-07-28

/wikipedia, /media

https://ilroot.com/wikipedia

Duplication

The Tantura and Marwan Barghouti audit cards each appeared twice on the same page, in slightly different wording.

One card each, keeping the more specific version.

Editing error. No factual claim changed; the weaker duplicate was removed.

Report an error

Quote the sentence and show the source. That is all that is needed, and it is the only thing that will actually move a page.

This page is not an apology and it is not a display of humility. It is the mechanism that makes the rest of the site worth reading. Anyone can publish confident claims. The question a reader should ask of any source, including this one, is what happens when it is caught out.

The record we keep on other outlets is specific: a correction published six days late, on page nothing, while the original number kept marching. We would have no standing to keep that record without keeping this one.