Everything We Got Wrong

Everyone gets things wrong. People, families, companies, all of us. The difference is what happens next. Most of the time the wrong thing quietly disappears, and the story gets a little cleaner every time it is told.

We built a page that does the opposite.

It is called errata, which is an old printing word for the list of mistakes bound into the front of a book. Ours lists every claim we have published and gotten wrong: what we said, what was actually true, which way the mistake leaned, and who it cost. Seven so far. Five of them made us look better than the truth did, and we fixed them anyway, because a standard you only apply when it is easy is not a standard.

Why keep a page like that where anyone can see it? Because Vera asks players to be checkable instead of just believed, and that is a big ask. We were never going to ask it of anyone before doing it ourselves, in public, first.

There is no trick to reading it. Go to the page and read the list. If you want to go further, the whole record is a file you can download and keep, and a small tool checks that nothing in it has been quietly changed since we published it. You do not need to be technical, and you do not need to trust us. That is the point.

One honest thing before you go. The check proves the file has not changed. It cannot prove we were telling the truth in the first place. Nothing can do that except time, and a list that keeps growing in whatever direction honesty takes it.

It works the way a good house works. Nobody in it is perfect, and everybody knows where they stand, because the sorry gets said out loud.

The mistakes are not the embarrassing part of the work. They are the proof that we are doing it.

Read it here: veraproject.xyz/errata.