Disputes

The distinction

A correction and a dispute are not the same object.

They sit on the same layer and they look alike, so the difference is worth stating before the two ledgers start drifting into each other.

The ledger

1. 0001 Five published accounts of how the maple leaf lost two points Between October 1964 and February 1965 the leaf on the Canadian flag went from thirteen points to eleven. Five accounts describe how — they credit three different people, give four different reasons, and the two men who say they were in the room do not describe the same afternoon. The Senate of Canada says a wind tunnel. Canadian Heritage does not mention one. Open2026-08-13
   5 accounts · 3 credited

One entry. As with the corrections ledger, this is the first, filed the same night the process was written, on a site nobody has been told about yet.

How this works

What is allowed to become a dispute.

Written now, with one entry on file, because these are the criteria most likely to be quietly relaxed later — a dispute page is a satisfying thing to make, and there is no shortage of Canadian history that would look good in this format and has no business here.

1. Two or more citable sources that cannot all be complete. Not a topic on which people differ, and not a debate. A specific pair of published statements that do not fit together, quoted verbatim with locators.
2. At least one of them an official organ of the Canadian state. Parliament, a department, a Crown agency, a statutory body. The subject is the state's account of itself. This is the criterion that stops this from becoming a history section, and it is the one under the most pressure.
3. The settling test, stated before publication. The specific document, fonds or record that would end the question, named in the record on the day it opens. A test named after an objection is not a test, it is a defence.
4. No resolution published, ever, by this site. There is no verdict, no “most likely account”, no confidence percentage. A dispute closes by citing the document that settled it, or it stays open. Weighing eyewitness testimony is a thing courts and historians do, with methods and standing this site does not have.
5. Every source fetched from its publisher, and every unreachable one named. Quoted from the bytes that came back, never from a search-result summary. A source that could not be fetched is listed as unreached rather than dropped, because a gap you can see is a different thing from a gap you cannot.
6. The record is a file, not a page. Each dispute is a JSON document with a SHA-256 over its exact bytes as served, same as a correction. The HTML is a rendering. Anyone can verify the accounts independently of how they happen to be laid out today.