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Pinchwell

Corrections

A reference site that quietly edits its mistakes is asking you to trust it without giving you any way to check. This page describes what happens when we get something wrong.

The rule

Corrections are recorded, not erased. When a published figure, ratio or claim turns out to be wrong, the page is fixed and the change is written down — what it said before, what it says now, and why it changed. The record is append-only. Nothing is removed from it once it has been added.

This applies to substantive changes: a ratio, a source, a claim about what a swap does. It does not apply to typography, a fixed link or a rewritten sentence that means the same thing.

Where corrections appear

  • On the page itself. Every substitution page carries a change record and a visible last-reviewed date.
  • In the project’s internal correction register, which is maintained continuously and numbered sequentially. It currently runs to more than fifty entries, most of them predating publication — corrections caught during research and verification rather than after readers saw them.

What counts as a correction here

Some examples of the kind of thing that has already been corrected during verification, to give you a sense of the standard:

  • A claim repeated by most competing pages was cut entirely because no source we could open supported it.
  • A regulatory percentage was re-checked after it became clear that the standard it came from binds manufacturers rather than cooks, and answers a different question from the one the page was asking.
  • A source’s own description of an ingredient’s botanical origin was found to be wrong, and was not used.

Reporting something

Write to contact@pinchwell.com. It helps if you can include the page, the specific figure or sentence, and — if you have one — a source. You do not need a source to report a problem; “this ratio does not work and here is what happened” is useful on its own.

What happens next:

  1. We re-open the sources cited on the page and check the claim against them.
  2. If the page is wrong, it is corrected and the change is recorded.
  3. If the page is right but unclear, it is rewritten, and that is recorded too.
  4. If we cannot resolve it, we say so on the page rather than leaving the disagreement invisible.

We do not promise a response time. We do read everything sent to that address.