Why every scoreboard on this site is empty

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.

Advertising law has held the opposite standard for decades: the FTC’s guidance for small businesses puts substantiation before the claim — you need the proof in hand when you publish, not when somebody asks. A style guide cannot enforce that at three in the morning before a launch. A compiler can.

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.