Every Ledger row edit is dated and kept. This page is where the old version stays.
The Mechanism Ledger is a living table, and a living table is only worth reading if you can see what it used to say. A reference that quietly rewrites a verdict is asking you to trust its present state on no evidence, and it is indistinguishable from a reference that was wrong and hoped nobody noticed. So every change to a row is appended here, with a date, the old value, the new value, and the source that moved it.
Nothing has changed yet. This log goes live with the Ledger itself, in the same deploy, so it is empty for the plainest possible reason: no row has been edited, because no row has existed anywhere a reader could see it until now. It is linked from the front page, and the first entry will appear the first time a verdict, a source, a version boundary or a measured effect moves.
§1What counts as a change, and what does not
Six kinds of edit are logged. Anything that alters what a reader would take away from a row is one of them.
| Kind | Logged | What the entry must carry |
|---|---|---|
| Verdict change | Always | Old code → new code, and the primary source that forced it |
| Version boundary change | Always | Old release → new release, and the documentation that dates it |
| Surface change | Always | Old path or API → new one. A wrong key is a wrong row |
| MEASURABLE EFFECT filled or emptied | Always | The counter, the magnitude, and where the number came from |
| Source added, replaced or lost | Always | Both URLs, and whether the loss was a redirect, a 404 or an unpublication |
| Row retracted | Always | The row stays on the Ledger, struck through, with the reason |
| Typography, wording, a fixed typo | Not logged | — |
| LAST VERIFIED re-dated with no other change | Not logged | — the date on the row is itself the record |
The last two exclusions are the only ones, and they are narrow on purpose. If a wording fix changes what the row asserts, it is a verdict change and it is logged as one.
§2The policy, stated so it can be held against us
Append-only. Entries are added at the top. No entry is edited after publication and no entry is removed. If an entry is itself wrong, a later entry corrects it and both stay.
Rows are never deleted. A surface that no longer exists in a supported build is marked with the ‡ flag and kept, because a meaningful share of the traffic to this domain arrives on links a decade old, and a reader who followed one of those links needs the historical row more than a reader on a current build does.
Identifiers are never reused and never renumbered. M-03 means one claim–surface pair for as long as this site exists. If a row is retracted its identifier retires with it. This is what makes /mechanisms/#S-04 safe to cite in someone else’s writing.
Once a year has passed without a re-check, the Ledger says so on the row itself, in the LAST VERIFIED column, where you cannot miss it. Documentation moves; Microsoft unpublished the registry-cleaner support policy some time after December 2023, and a reference that cannot notice that is not a reference.
Corrections we did not find ourselves are credited to whoever found them, by name if they want it, in the entry. The address is the contact form. A correction is published with the same prominence as the claim it corrects, which is the standing policy at /corrections/.
§3The log
Newest first. Each entry: date, row identifier, what moved, and why.
| Date | Row | Field | From | To | Why, and the source that moved it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No entries. This log ships in the same deploy as the Ledger, so there is nothing yet for it to record. This table is not a placeholder for a feature that does not exist — the format is fixed, the policy above is binding, and the first edit will appear here on the day it is made. | |||||
§4Why an empty log is worth publishing
A dated record cannot be constructed backwards. Anyone can copy a table of verdicts; nobody can copy eighteen months of dated evidence that the table was maintained, because that record only exists if the maintenance happened. Publishing the log on day one, empty, is what makes the second entry mean something.
It also sets the trap for us rather than for the reader. If this page still reads “no entries” in 2028, that is a fact about this publication that anyone can check in four seconds, and they should draw the obvious conclusion.
The related pages: the Ledger itself, the rows we could not settle, and the standing corrections policy, which covers errors in articles rather than in Ledger rows.