Most content policies are documents. This one is a type signature, because a policy that lives in a style guide gets violated by the person who has not read the style guide, and on a site publishing performance-adjacent numbers that is a failure with consequences.
The rule
No fabricated, extrapolated or estimated statistic appears anywhere on this site. Not as a placeholder, not as an illustration, not with an asterisk explaining that it is illustrative.
Why a document was not enough
The failure mode is not malice, it is convenience. A designer needs a number to size a component. A page looks empty without one. Someone types a plausible-looking percentage into the mockup intending to replace it before launch, and then it launches. Every fabricated statistic on the internet has roughly that origin story.
Making it structural
So a published statistic is not a number in this codebase. It is a value that can only be constructed from a reading that carries its own sample size and source, and which downgrades itself to a collecting state if the sample is below the floor. There is no constructor that takes a bare number. A component that wants to render a percentage has to be handed something that knows where it came from.
The build then checks the rendered output for the failure modes types cannot catch: a percentage in prose with no citation, a grade inconsistent with its score, a worked example whose risk-reward does not survive arithmetic. Three of those fired on real content during authoring, and all three were genuine defects rather than false positives — including a worked example that turned out to be structurally incapable of the risk-reward it claimed.
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