Technical articles go out of date, and occasionally one contains an error from the start. This page sets out how both are handled. The underlying principle is that a correction is a public act: a reader who relied on a claim should be able to see that it changed and why.
What counts as a correction
A correction is a change to something a reader could reasonably have relied on being accurate: a specification described incorrectly, a technical claim that is wrong, a description of a protocol that does not match how it behaves. Correcting these is not optional. If we cannot verify a claim, we remove it rather than leave it standing.
An editorial update is a change that improves the article without correcting an error: clearer explanation, a new section, a corrected example, a link to a page that has moved, or a change in wording for consistency. These are recorded in the corrections log when they are substantive, and they are not treated as admissions of error.
Not a correction: a difference of opinion, a preference between applications, or a statement that a judgement call was made differently.
How an error is verified
- The claim is located in the article and the correction is isolated.
- An authoritative source is identified: a published specification, an official vendor document, a regulator publication or a court record.
- The correction is checked against that source by a person, not inferred.
- The article is amended and the change is recorded.
If a report is right but we cannot find a source to support the corrected version, we treat that as a signal to remove or qualify the claim rather than to leave it as it stands.
How to report an error
Use the corrections route described in our contact page. A report that includes the article, the specific claim and a source for the correction is acted on far more quickly than one that only says something is wrong. We would rather be told about an error we missed than not told at all.
Reports are read by a person. We cannot commit to a response time, and we would rather make no time commitment than make one we do not keep.
What happens after a correction is verified
- The article is updated to the corrected wording.
- The change is entered in the corrections log with the date, the article affected and a brief description of what changed.
- Where the correction changes a conclusion rather than a detail, that is stated plainly rather than softened.
- Where a reader reported it, the log records that a reader raised it.
How articles are kept current
Technical information ages. Standards are revised, applications change their interfaces, operating systems drop support, and device models go out of production. The editorial policy describes how this is tracked. In short: articles carry a review status, specifications and vendor claims are re-checked periodically, and where information is known to be time-sensitive the article says so rather than implying a currency it does not have.
Where an article cannot be kept current, it will be updated to say so, or withdrawn. An article that is quietly wrong is worse than no article.
If we disagree with a report
We will say so, and explain why. A report can be mistaken, or a source can be unreliable. Where we decide the original wording stands, we will set out the reasoning rather than simply declining, because an unexplained refusal is indistinguishable from ignoring the reader.