The Workbench · The Shelf
A correction has to cite a source, not just a feeling
This blog has already covered how a template's own citations, not its layout, are what actually make it worth taking, and how a template goes stale quietly, the moment its underlying source moves and nobody rechecks the page. Both essays describe a discipline the shelf holds its own work to. The same discipline has to apply to what comes back in from a reader, and it mostly doesn't get applied by the reader sending it — most messages that say a template is wrong don't actually say what would have to be true for that claim to be checkable.
Two messages that look identical and aren't
“Your CAPA tracker is missing something” and “your CAPA tracker's aging column cites 820.100, and that section was reserved by the QMSR on February 2, 2026” are both, formally, corrections. Only the second one is something an editor can act on without doing the reader's own research first. The first is a complaint with a feeling attached to it — real, possibly correct, but not yet evidence. Most of what arrives through the contribution page looks like the first kind, because naming a problem is easy and tracing it to its source is the actual work a correction is supposed to save someone else from redoing.
What makes the second kind actionable
This blog has already set out what makes one checklist item trustworthy: it traces to a primary source, it states one verifiable claim, and it names which revision of the source it was checked against. A correction worth acting on has to clear the same three bars, run in reverse — it has to name the current source, state specifically what the template says that no longer matches it, and say what changed and roughly when. “This is wrong” fails all three. “Clause 7.4.2 also covers supplier change-notification, and your purchasing template doesn't mention it” passes all three in one sentence.
What the editor actually does with a sourced correction
A correction that clears that bar still doesn't get taken on faith — it gets checked, the same way every citation on the shelf gets checked before it's written down the first time. If the cited source resolves and the template's current text really doesn't account for it, the fix ships, the revision note changes, and the correction gets credited publicly, the same way an accepted contribution does. The check is usually fast precisely because the correction did the hard part already: it said where to look.
What happens to the first kind
A correction with no citation doesn't get discarded on sight, because “this feels wrong” is sometimes an early, imprecise read on a real gap that just hasn't been traced yet. What it doesn't get is a same-day fix. It sits until either the reader comes back with the specific clause or section they meant, or someone on this side goes and finds it independently — which is the slower path, and one the correction's own citation would have skipped. A pattern of several uncited reports pointing at the same template is itself a signal worth chasing down directly, even without any one of them carrying a source. One alone usually isn't. The difference isn't about tone, either — a polite uncited note and a blunt one wait in exactly the same place, and a sharply worded citation still gets acted on the same day a gentle one would.
Why the bar stays where it is
Lowering it would feel more welcoming and cost the shelf exactly what the citation discipline is there to protect: a shelf that fixes things because someone sounded confident, rather than because something checkable actually moved, stops being source-mapped the first time it does that, no matter how accurate the uncited tip happened to be. The ask isn't that a reader already know the answer — it's that a correction says where the answer can be checked, which is usually one search away from whatever made the reader notice the gap in the first place.
Where this meets the file
If you've found a place where a citation on the launch catalog doesn't resolve, or resolves to something that's since moved, the shelf takes that correction directly — name the source, name what changed, and it gets checked against the same bar everything else here was built to.
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