Fact checking usually degrades into confirming that a number appears somewhere on the internet, which is how a misquoted figure survives ten years of citation. The real work is tracing claims to a primary source and checking the source still says what everyone thinks it says. In regulated sectors an unverified claim is a compliance issue, not just an accuracy one.
verify-claims-before-publish.md
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name: verify-claims-before-publish
description: Use when a draft contains statistics, quotes or factual assertions that will be visible to customers or regulators.
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# Verify Claims Before Publish
Fact checking usually degrades into confirming that a number appears somewhere on the internet, which is how a misquoted figure survives ten years of citation. The real work is tracing claims to a primary source and checking the source still says what everyone thinks it says. In regulated sectors an unverified claim is a compliance issue, not just an accuracy one.
## What you need first
- the draft with every factual claim marked
- access to primary sources or the ability to request them
- a record of which claims were checked and when
## Method
1. Separate claims into three types: verifiable facts, opinions, and predictions. Only the first needs sourcing; the other two need attribution instead, which is a different fix.
2. Trace each statistic back through citations to the original study or dataset. Stop only when you reach the body that produced the number - a news article citing a report citing a survey is three removes from evidence.
3. Check the date and the population of the original. A figure that was true for one country in one year is routinely republished as a universal constant.
4. For any claim you cannot trace to a primary source, either cut it or restate it as attributed opinion. Do not keep it with a weaker verb.
5. Check claims about your own product against what the product currently does, not what the roadmap says. Marketing pages describing unreleased behaviour are the most common source of complaints.
6. Record source URL, publication date and access date next to each claim in a working file, so the next refresh does not repeat the entire trace.
## What this produces
A draft where every retained factual claim has a primary source logged with its date, and untraceable claims are cut or attributed.
## Where this goes wrong
- Accepting a figure because several sites repeat it - repetition across sites usually traces to one original, often misread
- Leaving statistics undated on the page, so a correct 2019 figure reads as a current one and quietly becomes false
- Checking the headline number but not the methodology, then repeating a survey of 200 self-selected respondents as an industry benchmark
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From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/verify-claims-before-publish
Free to download · no account, no email
A draft where every retained factual claim has a primary source logged with its date, and untraceable claims are cut or attributed.