Corrections Policy
Errors happen here at roughly the rate they happen anywhere, and the only thing a reader can fairly judge us on is what we do next. This page is what we do next. Last updated: August 2026.
Correction, clarification, update: three different things
A correction means we got a fact wrong: a name, a number, a date, a job title, a claim attributed to the wrong person. A clarification means every fact was right and the wording still walked a reasonable reader somewhere false, usually through what the sentence left out. An update means nothing was wrong and the story moved.
We keep a fourth category that is ours. If an explanation was accurate and left the reader no clearer, we treat it as an error, rewrite the passage and log it. A reader who says they read our paragraph on squad cost rules twice and still could not explain it to a friend has reported a genuine fault, not a matter of taste.
The note goes on the article, and the address does not change
Corrections are made in the original piece, with a dated note saying what was wrong and what it says now. Material errors carry that note at the top where a returning reader cannot miss it, and smaller ones carry it at the foot. Fixing a sentence and saying nothing costs us nothing, which is how you can tell it is not honesty.
Typographical and formatting fixes are made without a note, and it is fair to know which ones we mean: a misspelled common word, a broken link, a duplicated line, a missing caption. If a fix changes what a sentence means, it has stopped being a typo and gets a note. A misspelled personal name or place name is a factual error and is handled as one.
Telling us
Write to support@significadopedia.com and start the subject line with the word Correction. Send the link or the headline, quote the sentence you think is wrong, and give us the right version if you know it. You do not need to be certain. Perhaps half of what arrives is not an error, and the other half is worth all of the sorting.
We acknowledge corrections the same working day and settle most within two. Where the answer waits on a document from a court or a ministry, we say the case is open and roughly how long it should take. You get an answer whether or not we agree with you, and when we are not changing anything we say why.
Who decides
The editor who owns standards makes the call, not the writer and not the section editor who commissioned the piece. Both are asked what happened and neither rules on it, which is the whole reason those jobs sit apart. Where that editor wrote or commissioned the copy in question, the decision passes to the managing editor.
Corrections are not held back for a convenient hour. A story that is wrong at four in the afternoon gets corrected at four in the afternoon, not at the quiet end of the evening when fewer people are looking. That editor can also pull a single claim out of a live story while the rest of it stands.
Chasing the wrong version everywhere else it went
An error rarely stays on one page. Where the mistake appeared in a social post, the post comes down and goes back up carrying the corrected line, and where the post itself was accurate we reply to it pointing at the correction. A newsletter error is corrected at the top of the next send, not buried at the bottom.
Publishers who licence our explainer material are told in writing and asked to apply the fix. We cannot compel them, and we say so instead of implying more reach than we have. The hard case is our own reference side: when the underlying definition was wrong, the glossary page is corrected and every article leaning on that term has to be found and checked, because one bad definition is not wrong once, it is wrong in thirty places.
We correct, we do not delete
Articles stay up. A published piece is part of the record, and removing it to tidy the record up is a worse act than the error it contained.
The exceptions are narrow, and we would rather list them than leave you guessing.
- A binding legal order requiring removal.
- A specific, serious safety risk to a named person created by the material staying online.
- Something that was never meant to publish, such as a draft going live by accident.
- Material we turn out to have had no right to publish at all.
Where a piece does come down, its address keeps a short note recording that something was removed and the general reason. We do not unpublish because a subject regrets a quote given on the record, because a lawyer sent a firm letter without identifying an actual error, or because a reputation consultant wants an old story to stop appearing in search results.
The log
Significant corrections are logged with the date, the piece, what was wrong and one line on how it got through. The log exists to find patterns rather than to perform contrition, and the patterns are dull and useful: unexplained-term failures cluster on fast stories filed inside the first hour, and stale explanations cluster a few weeks after a governing body quietly changes a rule.
We publish a summary of that log rather than a monthly tally, because a count on its own says nothing about severity. How a claim is meant to be checked before any of this becomes necessary is in our fact-checking policy, and the rules the whole desk works to are in our editorial standards.
