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Method

How a claim gets onto this site, what each status word means, how often it is re-checked, and the cases where the honest answer is a 404.

Published 2026-08-06 · Status of facts checked 2026-08-06

The source ladder

Claims are graded by what supports them, and the grade is published beside the claim rather than kept in a style guide.

High

A primary document, or a contemporaneous report in a publication with an editor: a company’s own announcement, a repository commit, a registry or court filing, an archived capture showing the state directly.

Medium

A single reliable secondary source, named in the text. Encyclopaedia entries sit here and are attributed as such, never laundered into a flat assertion.

Low

Neither was found. The claim is not made. The row reads could not be verified and, where the claim circulates widely enough to be worth warning about, it is published on the unverified list instead.

A second source repeating the first does not raise a grade. Thirty of the fifty names on the 2007 roster sit at low, which is why the census reads worse than the confident lists a reader will find elsewhere. That gap is the point.

Two dates, never one

Every reference carries the source’s own publication date and the date it was retrieved:

Author. “Title.” Publication, 2017-06-01. https://example.org/path — retrieved 2026-08-06.

A source with no publication date is written n.d. and is never given the citing article’s own date. A bibliography that stamps a 2007 article with a 2026 date advertises that its apparatus was generated rather than checked, and one wrong date discredits the other five entries.

The status vocabulary

Five words, and no sixth. Each is a claim about a specific thing on a specific date, not a summary of a company’s fortunes.

Kept

Still offers somewhere to save a link. A domain that is online but no longer does that is not kept — it answers a different question than the one a reader is asking.

Read-only

Reachable, holding existing material, not accepting new.

Moved

The product continues under other ownership. No row currently carries this, so the Ledger offers no filter for it; the word is defined here because a re-check will eventually need it.

Gone

No longer operating as a place to save links.

Unverified

This publication could not establish the position to the standard above.

Colour on this site is a semantic instrument. The only saturated ink on any page is one of these statuses, which means nothing here is coloured for decoration and no service can be mentioned in the Ledger without a status being chosen for it.

Re-check cadence

Ledger rows are re-checked and re-stamped twice a year. Every re-stamp is recorded at Changes with the source that caused it, and that page has its own feed. A row whose checked date is more than a year old should be treated as stale, and saying so is more useful than quietly refreshing the date.

Claims this site does not make

Nothing here is written from personal use. No article says a tool was tried, lived with, tested or preferred, because no such testing stands behind these pages and describing one that did not happen would be a false claim about a product regardless of who typed it. Where an action must be attributed, the publication is named: this publication could not verify that claim.

There are no scores, no rankings, no “best for” headings and no winner. Inclusion is a rule about the object — a service is in the Ledger because it meets the stated inclusion rule, and for no other reason. No placement is or ever will be paid for.

Historical technique is described, never taught. The 2007–2010 material on this site is labelled as a period document, carries the year in its header, and is not instructions for anyone’s current machine.

Why some old addresses return 404

This domain carries citations from 2007 onward. Where a cited address had a page whose subject this publication genuinely covers, that address serves a real page. Where it did not — a saved link to a shopping page, a wire story, a celebrity listicle — the address returns 404.

The alternative would be redirecting those addresses to something broadly related. A redirect to a page that does not answer the question is worse than an honest 404 that explains itself: it costs the reader a click and tells them nothing. So the 404 page does the explaining. This decision is recorded here so that it has to be argued against rather than quietly reversed.

Corrections

A correction is appended to the article it concerns, with its own date and a plain statement of what was wrong, and simultaneously listed at Corrections. There is no distinction between a correction, a clarification and an editor’s note. Spelling is fixed silently. Nothing is deleted.