# Publish numbers with a source and a verified date

Every published number carries a source and a verified date, re-probed weekly. On the verifier's first cycle, 13 of 16 published facts had drifted.

From the [Learned the hard way](../index.md#learned) section of [The Muse Field Guide](../index.md).

## The claim

That published numbers should be stored as facts with a source, a reproducible reference, and a verified date, and rendered from that file rather than typed into prose.

## What happened

The household's publishing pattern stores each fact with an identifier, a label, a value, a kind (machine, ruling, or historical), a source, a verified date, and a publish flag. The verifier earns its keep: on its first cycle, 13 of 16 published facts had drifted from their sources. Without the re-probe, the site would still be stating them confidently.

## Where this came from

Two guards keep it honest: a deploy aborts if the facts file is more than 14 days old, and a weekly verifier re-probes the published facts against their sources.

Deep dive: [Steal this](../deep-dives/steal-this.md)

Related resources: [Spot-check every background number](spot-check-background-numbers.md), [The public-editions scrub checklist](public-editions-scrub-checklist.md)

Canonical page: https://www.niclydon.io/muse/items/verdict-facts-with-dates.html