Honesty and verification policy

A claim’s status is a pure function of what is attached to it. If the person filing could tick “verified” on their own claim, the word would mean nothing; because the status is computed from provenance, it means exactly one thing — what kind of corroboration exists — and nothing about whether the person is good, or even whether the claim is true.

self-asserted

The filer says it happened. Nothing else is attached.

attested

Another filed person confirms it, under their own name and on their own record.

documented

Supporting documentation exists and was sighted against the claim by someone other than the filer. Attaching your own document does not reach this state.

independently verified

An organisation or public record outside this office confirms it.

disputed

A filed person has signed a challenge to this claim. Both statements are preserved.

withdrawn

The filer has withdrawn this assertion. The text remains on the record.

The first four are a ladder of corroboration, not of virtue. A great deal of what matters about a person’s conduct leaves no paper trail at all — “I have not used since 14 August 2016” cannot be verified by a records office, which does not make it less true or less important. The last two sit outside the ladder rather than below it.

An attestation names one numbered claim on one record, records the attestor’s relationship to the filer — friend, employer, former colleague, neighbour — and says something specific. The relationship is recorded because a friend and an employer are not the same witness, and a reader deserves to know which they are looking at. It carries the attestor’s handle and links to their own filing, which means vouching is not free: whatever you attest to is attached to your record as well, in public, with a date. An attestation you later regret cannot be deleted, only amended — same rule as everything else here.

Every filing must contain at least one disclosure. The minimum acceptable entry is an acknowledgement without detail — “there is something, I am not going to elaborate” — and we mean it when we say that is enough. Some things are not ours, or the public’s, to have. What is not permitted is the implication that there is nothing.

Disclosures are never collapsed, never below a fold, never behind a click, and appear on the record in the same typeface and at the same size as the claims. A reader skimming a record should hit them by accident.

Change a claim after filing and the record carries a numbered amendment showing the field that changed, the wording as it previously read, the wording as it reads now, both dates, and the reason you gave. This applies to softening a claim, strengthening it, or fixing a typo. We would rather carry the noise of visible trivial corrections than offer any mechanism at all for an invisible one.

A claim can be withdrawn, which removes the assertion but not the text: the claim stays visible, struck through, with the date and your stated reason. A whole record can be withdrawn on the same terms. Nothing is ever deleted. That trade is what makes a filing here mean anything — if records could be unmade, a clean one would tell you nothing.

The hash exists so that a reader who does not trust this office can still check that a pledge says today what it said when it was signed. The pre-image format is published, the hash is recomputed from the stored text on every page load rather than read from a field, and both are included in the structured data. Verify one yourself:

printf '%s' 'pledgeText|dateSigned' | shasum -a 256

A filed person who knows better can raise a dispute against one specific claim on somebody else’s record. It carries their handle, their relationship to the filer, the date, and their statement. The filer may respond, and the response sits immediately beside it.

Neither side is adjudicated, and the claim does not go away. It is marked disputed, which is not a demotion — it is an accurate description of the state of the world when two people who were there disagree. Both statements stay on the record permanently, including after a dispute is marked resolved.

This is the answer to “what is stopping everyone from simply lying?” The system does not prevent it. It preserves uncertainty instead, attributably, and makes a lie awkward to maintain in front of people who were present.

We are a filings office, not a court. If a claim marked verified is disputed, we re-check the evidence against its source and, if it no longer holds, the status is reverted to self-asserted with a dated note — an action taken about the evidence, which is the only thing we have any standing to judge.

If a self-asserted claim is disputed, we do nothing, because there is nothing honest for us to do. We have no power to investigate anyone’s life and no business pretending otherwise. The remedy available to a disputant is the one available to everyone: file your own record, at your own name, and say so there.

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