Methodology

What qualifies as an entry

Entries are limited to claims that were confident, dated, and falsifiable - a specific thing that would happen by a specific time. Opinions, predictions still within their stated window, and claims with no checkable outcome are excluded. The business-ventures ledger applies the same standard to enterprises with a documented end state: bankruptcy, closure, sale, or discontinuation.

What gets excluded

The bar is not that someone was wrong. It is that the claim was testable, was actually tested, and failed. Claims are removed when:

• The triggering event never happened. A prediction of the form “when X occurs, Y will follow” is not refuted if X never occurred - it was never put to the test. That is a null result, not a miss.
• The claim was hedged into unfalsifiability. “Could”, “might”, “capable of” assert possibility, not outcome. Nothing that fails to happen can refute them.
• There was no deadline. “Soon” or “in the coming years” can always be called still pending.
• The window is still open. The stated date has not passed yet. Not wrong - just not yet checkable.

A prediction the speaker made about their own actions is different: if someone promises to ship a product by a date and then cancels it, the cancellation is the failure. The exclusion applies to conditions outside the speaker's control that never materialised.

Confidence badges

High

A verbatim or close quote from a documented source, paired with a clear, documented outcome.

Medium

A paraphrase, a secondary source, an evolving outcome, or an inherently contestable claim. Where the specific weakness matters, it is flagged inline on the entry.

Sourcing

Entries cite PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, AP, Reuters, the Washington Post Fact Checker, Forbes, NPR, the BBC, earnings-call transcripts, court records, and primary posts or video. Follow the links and judge the claim yourself - the ledger is a starting point for verification, not a substitute for it.

Some medium-confidence quotes rest on transcript compilations rather than primary recordings. Those are the entries most worth an independent check.

Portraits

Subject photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and are either public domain (official U.S. government works) or Creative Commons licensed. Each portrait carries its photographer credit and license inline on the ledger page. Images are unmodified apart from resizing.

The right-wing media ledger has no portrait - it covers many outlets and hosts rather than a single subject.

Corrections

If an entry is wrong, out of date, or missing context, the correction is the point. Open an issue with the entry, the specific problem, and a source.