Quietly rewriting a published piece and leaving no trace is what costs a publication its credibility. So this page states where the line is, and the system enforces it.
What is a silent fix
A typo, a broken link, a misspelled name caught within minutes of publishing, a formatting problem. Anything where no reader could have taken away a different meaning. These are fixed without a note.
What is a correction
Anything a reader could have acted on and been wrong about. A wrong price, a wrong specification, a wrong score, a misattributed quote, a claim we could not stand behind. These are not edited away.
A correction is a dated record attached to the piece, not an edit. It appears at the foot of the piece, says what was wrong and what is right, and sets the piece's modified date. The original claim is described rather than made to disappear, so you can see what changed.
If the error was serious enough that the piece's conclusion changed, that is said at the top, not only at the bottom.
Updates
A long-lived piece — a buying guide, a review of something still on sale — gets revisited as prices and firmware move. A substantive update is dated and described in the same way. Refreshing a price is not.
Retractions
If a piece should not have run, it is retracted: the page stays at its address with an explanation of why it was withdrawn, rather than being deleted. A deleted page leaves inbound links, screenshots and no account of what happened.
Telling us
Write to support@semifunctional.tech with the piece and what is wrong with it. Corrections are the inquiries we answer first.