Editorial policy
How Kept in Service is written and checked, what it will not publish, and how corrections and advertising are handled.
Service page · edition of
Kept in Service publishes one kind of text: an entry that answers a single question about a personal computer. Everything on the site follows the rules on this page, and the rules are published so a reader can hold the desk to them.
Where an answer comes from
An answer is built from documentation the desk can name: manufacturer specification sheets and service manuals, published standards, operating system documentation, and the repair literature. When a question is settled by measurement rather than by a document, the entry describes the measurement and the instrument.
Where two sources disagree, the entry says that they disagree and describes the difference. Where no source settles the question, the entry says so and stops, rather than filling the gap with a plausible number.
Corrections
A correction is sent to the address on the contact page with the source that settles the disagreement. When the desk accepts a correction, the sentence is rewritten, the entry is republished and its checked-on date moves to the day of the change. Corrections are not hidden and are not applied silently.
The date on an entry
The date carried by an entry is the day the desk last checked it against its sources, not the day it was first published. That date orders the front page, dates the item in the feed and appears in the sitemap. An entry that has not been rechecked keeps its old date, because an unchanged date is the honest statement.