fact-checking-explainers

Fact-Checking Explainers

Overview

An explainer's authority comes from being right. A reader who catches one confident, wrong claim stops trusting the rest of the piece, figures and all. This skill makes claim verification enforceable by tying every checkable claim to evidence you can point to, correcting it, or cutting it. It is not a proofreading pass and not advisory: it is the gate an explainer passes before it is delivered.

The Iron Law

NO EXPLAINER SHIPS WITH AN UNVERIFIED FACTUAL CLAIM.

Every checkable claim either traces to a source that supports it, gets corrected to match the source, or gets cut.

Apply the same resolution loop to every factual claim:

• Support it with an actual source passage you can point to.
• Correct it until it matches the source.
• Cut it when no source supports it.

Treat memory, plausibility, background knowledge, and deadline pressure as signals to run the loop, not reasons to skip it. "Verify" means checking an actual source in this session.

When to Use

Run this skill:

• At research-time, over the sources gathered for an explainer, before any drafting.
• Post-draft, over the finished article, before delivery. This is a blocking gate.
• On request, whenever asked to fact-check, verify, or audit an explainer or article.

creating-explainers and explaining-codebases both call this skill at the gates above. When they do, interactive explainer delivery waits for a PASS report.

When NOT to use: content that is not an explainer, or a pure opinion or editorial piece that makes no factual claims. (Most explainers make many factual claims. Default to running it.)

What Counts as a Checkable Claim

A checkable claim is a specific factual or empirical assertion:

• numbers, dates, measurements, percentages
• names, attributions, who-did-what, who-built-what
• direct quotes
• historical events and their order
• performance results and benchmarks
• mechanism claims: "X uses Y", "X causes Y", "X is faster than Y because Z"