As Common Ground's public sites, wiki pages and resume materials multiplied, small factual drifts started compounding. The same building showing a different unit count on two sites. A company's collective career figure creeping onto my own resume like it was my personal number.
I set a rule for what counts as a real contradiction worth fixing versus an honest difference in framing. Two different entities, or two different people, can legitimately report different numbers for the same underlying history. But the same entity contradicting itself, or a collective figure getting relabeled as one person's personal result, doesn't get to stand. Same discipline showed up in a separate publish gate that refused to let a wiki page ship with an unresolved factual mismatch, and in a decision to leave an impressive but unverified claim about a partner off a public page until I confirmed it myself.
I was protecting two things at once. Not looking sloppy or dishonest in public, and not letting my own resume quietly inherit a bigger number that belonged to my whole firm's collective history. That's a form of overclaiming you can talk yourself into without ever typing a fake number.
The same-entity-versus-cross-entity distinction became the standing rule. It caught a collective dollar figure that machine-readable site data had attributed to me personally, a project's self-contradicting count on one site, and a unit count mismatch between two live sites for the same building. A separate publish gate blocked a finished wiki from shipping until an address and a completion year claim were corrected, and I held a genuinely impressive but unverified claim about a partner's outside investments off a public page pending my own confirmation.
A number can be true and still be a lie if you attach it to the wrong person.
Protecting credibility without needing to blame anyone, since most of these drifts were nobody's fault, just entropy across a lot of public surfaces.