Method

The honesty ledger at the foot of each machine is where the stopping point gets written down. Interleave says the interleaving is real and the Reed-Solomon arithmetic is not performed, because it counts what would be corrected instead of correcting it. Core Memory says the switching rule is modelled and the magnetics are not: no B-H curve, no domain walls, no coercivity. Punch Cards says the card's outside dimensions are the real ones and the hole pitch is approximate. A ledger saying "some details are simplified" would be worth nothing. The test is whether somebody who knows the real machine could read the ledger and agree with it.

A standard first, where a body defines the thing: ECMA-130 for a compact disc frame, the GS1 General Specifications for a barcode, ITU-R M.1677-1 for Morse timing. Then a patent, where an inventor had to describe a mechanism to claim it. Then the paper the result was published in. Then an institution: a museum record, a manufacturer's manual, a scanned document in a library. Then contemporary reporting, for what was known at the time. Everything else comes last, including an encyclopaedia, which is a fine place to start reading and a poor place to stop.

Banning them would produce a worse dishonesty: dropping the citation and keeping the claim. They are registered instead, each one naming what it carries, why nothing better does, and a date to look again. Some will never improve. The origin of the word nibble is folklore, and an encyclopaedia is the only place any of it is written down. One is correct as it stands: PageRank cites an encyclopaedia for the version of the formula that appears everywhere the paper is cited, which is a claim about the secondary literature. A primary source would make that citation wrong.

CRC cites a 1961 paper that would not come out from behind its paywall. Fifteen Planes cites Marsaglia's 1968 note, which PNAS, PubMed Central, NCBI and Europe PMC all refused in different ways. Masking cites two papers by DOI, checked against Crossref for title, authors, volume and pages, and says plainly that neither was read. Interleave carries a pair of published burst figures that appear in none of the five documents it cites, and says so instead of dropping them.

Any figure printed here has to be produced by a test that computes it from something more basic, independently of the code the page runs. Fifteen Planes derives its recurrence from the multiplier and the modulus, then checks every triple against it. Interleave derives the correctable scratch width from a four-frame delay and four parity symbols, and reports 2.6 mm against a published 2.5 mm instead of rounding until they agree. Checkout rebuilds all fifteen barcode symbols against an independent implementation, then reads the drawn symbol back with a real decoder.

Every cited source is fetched and archived. Every quotation is checked against the archived copy and against the page, so a citation cannot drift on either side without something going red. Where a document is a scan, the quotation matches the scan's own text, spelling and typographic quirks included. Tidying a quotation is how a misattribution starts.

A gate loads every machine and compares the parts they share, because three different renderings of the same header each look fine on their own. Another walks every drawn surface to confirm it is visible somewhere. Another confirms every control does something. None of this replaces looking at the page, and all of it catches things looking does not.

A barcode shipped that decoded to nothing, because an encoding table was copied from one language into another and drifted. A card renderer printed a year that contradicted the roster beside it. Interleave took the constants it computes with from an encyclopaedia for weeks while the gate that checks sources reported everything fine, because that gate could not see the shape its sources block was written in.

All three failures have the same shape: a check that cannot see something reports the same green as a check that looked and found nothing. So a defect here is not finished when the page is right. It is finished when the thing that would have caught it exists, and has been proven to fail on the original defect before anyone trusts it.

The page as it stands is the current version, and old errors are not memorialised in the running text. Where two sources disagree and neither is clearly better, both are printed and the disagreement stays: Interleave carries two sets of burst figures and picks neither, and Core Memory prints one wording of a famous Forrester line while showing the museum's shorter one beside it. Where a claim was retired, the page says what it used to say and why it stopped. If something here is wrong, say so, and bring the document.

The machines are built by the author. AI tools assist with drafting, review and checking, as they do on RoamingPigs, and the same rule holds: nothing is published that a tool produced end to end without the author's authorship and review. The card and social images are not AI-generated. Each one is drawn by that machine's own renderer from that machine's own data, which is why a card can go stale and be caught by a gate. None of this moves the bar. Every number still has to be derived by a test, every source fetched and read, every quotation matched to the document, and every gate green before a deploy. All of it is under the author's name and the author's accountability.