Edited is not verified

Every document store records when a page last changed. Almost all of them then use that timestamp to answer a completely different question: can I trust this?

Those are not the same question, and the gap between them is where stale documentation does its damage.

• Edited means someone changed the bytes.
• Verified means someone compared the claim to reality and it held.

An edit can be a typo fix, a formatting pass, a link update, a reorganisation — none of which involve looking at the thing being described. Meanwhile a page can be wrong for a year, get a comma added, and instantly present as freshly maintained. The signal moves in the reassuring direction for a change that carried no information about correctness at all.

Why I care more about this than it seems to deserve

Because the reader is often an agent, and an agent cannot smell staleness.

A human reading a runbook has ambient context. They know the service was rewritten in the spring. They notice the screenshot shows an old interface, that a hostname looks like the old naming scheme, that nobody talks about this system anymore. That ambient sense is doing enormous unacknowledged work, and it is exactly what a fresh context window does not have.

An agent gets the text and the metadata, and if the metadata says updated recently, it has no independent way to doubt it. It will act on a confident, recently-touched, entirely wrong page more readily than a human would, and it will cite it. Getting this distinction right matters more the more of your readers arrive with no memory.

How the wiki models it

Three rules, and the third is the one that took me longest to accept.

Freshness measures from the last verification, never the last edit. An edit does not reset the clock. This means a page can be simultaneously just edited and very stale, and displaying both is correct rather than contradictory.

Verification is a separate, explicit act. There is a way to say "I checked this against the live system and it holds" that does not involve changing the page. Recording a verification without an edit is the normal, expected case — most of the time the docs are right, and that fact is worth writing down. Confirming a page must be cheaper than editing it, or nobody does it.

A page nobody has ever verified can never read as fresh. Not even the instant it is written. At best it is untracked or aging. This felt wrong when I implemented it — surely something written thirty seconds ago is current? — and it is the rule I would now defend hardest. When a page is created, one person believed it, once. That is an assertion, not a confirmation. The whole value of a freshness signal is that it distinguishes claimed from checked, and if authorship alone produced freshness, every page would be born fresh and the signal would degrade into a proxy for recent activity.

The awkward consequence is that a brand-new correct page looks unproven next to an old confirmed one. That is not a flaw in the display; it is an accurate report of the evidence, and the fix is for somebody to look.

One combined case. An edit made while looking at the live system is genuinely both, and the writer can say so explicitly — the write records a verification alongside the change. It has to be opt-in and it has to be a deliberate claim, because the whole distinction collapses the moment editing silently implies checking.

The general shape

This is a special case of a broader modelling error: two facts share a data type, so they get stored in one field, and the meaning of the more useful one quietly wins.

You see it in monitoring — last check versus last successful check, and the dashboard that shows the first one goes green while the world burns. You see it in caches — last written versus last validated against origin. You see it in approvals — last modified versus last reviewed.

In every case the two timestamps look identical, sort identically, and render identically, and there is enormous pressure to keep only one because storing two dates for "when did this happen" feels redundant.

It is not redundant. One of them is about the artifact and the other is about the world, and the interesting question is nearly always about the world.

The test that keeps it honest

Ask, of any freshness signal: what does an edit that changes nothing about correctness do to this number?

If the answer is "improves it", the signal is measuring activity and calling it trust, and it will be at its most reassuring exactly when a document has been groomed but not checked.