Corrections

Reporting one

Write to [email protected], or use the four fields on contact and choose the first subject in the list. The useful things to include are the page and the sentence. Everything else is optional, including a name.

There is no form to fill in beyond those four fields, no account, and nothing to sign.

What happens then

1. The report is read at the desk during posted hours, Monday to Thursday, 10 am to 4 pm Central.
2. It is checked against the source the statement came from. If the statement had no source, that is itself the finding, and the sentence comes out.
3. The page changes, or it does not. If it changes, the date at the foot of the page moves. If it does not change, a reply says why, naming what was checked.
4. A reply goes back within two working days and sometimes three.

A correction is credited by initial only, unless whoever sent it asks for something else or asks for nothing.

What counts as an error here

• A statement of fact that is wrong: a date, a process, a material property, a claim about how something was made
• A statement presented as established when the record is actually unsettled
• A source described in a way its own text does not support
• A number that cannot be reconciled with the source it came from
• An entry cell that answers a question the source does not answer

What is corrected without a note

Spelling, punctuation, a broken link, a repeated word, an image with a caption that does not match it. These are fixed as found and the date moves, because a note on every typographical fix would bury the corrections that matter.

What will not be changed on request

A statement that is accurate and unwelcome. If a source says a material behaved badly, that stays, and the reply will name the source. Nothing on this site is removed because somebody would prefer it were not there, and nothing is added because somebody would prefer that it were.

Requests to name a company, a product or a trade are also declined, whatever their form, because nothing on this site names one.

The standing uncertainties

Some things are not errors and are not settled, and it is more honest to list them here than to write around them:

• Why the site made concrete block trade collapsed in the nineteen twenties is not settled among people who study it. Several causes are usually offered together and this catalogue offers them the same way.
• Which yard a particular brick came from is almost never determinable from a wall. Where an entry describes a source it describes a kind of source, not an identified one.
• Whether a wall is solid or a veneer cannot be established from a photograph, and the catalogue says unknown rather than guessing.