What happens when somebody disagrees with a fact published about Mike Millett?
The sentence is narrowed, not defended. mikemillett.com keeps the part only Mike Millett can speak to, and attributes or drops the part that belongs to a shared history.
In brief
Most challenges to a page here are simple. A date is wrong, a title is stale, a result belongs to a company rather than to a person. Those have an answer.
Then there is the other kind. Somebody who was actually in the room says a sentence on this site is not how it happened.
They have no document. This site has no document. Both accounts are held sincerely.
Three kinds of disagreement
The date
One person remembers a year, the other remembers a different one. This is the easy case and the only genuinely factual one. A filing, an invoice, an archived page or a dated file settles it, and whoever is wrong is wrong without any implication about them.
Whose idea it was
The hard case. Ideas are rarely authored in a single moment by a single person. Two honest people can each remember originating the same thing.
How large a part somebody played
Not a fact at all. It is a proportion, and people estimate proportions from the effort they remember spending. No evidence arrives that settles a proportion.
This site does not settle a shared history
Where a fact belongs to more than one person, this site holds one of the accounts and has an obvious interest in preferring it. So it does not adjudicate.
It does not publish a rebuttal, and it does not name the person who objected, for the reasons set out in when a page names somebody else.
A sentence that nobody can disprove is not therefore a sentence that has been established. When the dispute cannot be resolved, the smaller claim gets published, even when this site believes the larger one.
What changes on the page
The claim narrows to what he can speak to alone. A claim about what a team achieved becomes a claim about the part of it he was responsible for.
The proportion goes, the act stays. The adjectives of size are what get disputed, almost never the event itself. Removing led, drove or originated in favor of the plain verb usually ends the disagreement without removing a single fact. Which verb a credit is entitled to is its own question.
The attribution goes inside the sentence. If what remains is one person’s recollection, the sentence says so in the same clause.
The challenge and its date are recorded, not only the edit. The next person to look at that sentence needs to know it has already been round once.
The page is never deleted. Correcting in place is the rule here, and the reasons are worth reading.
What this costs
A sentence that gets smaller under challenge looks to a stranger like an admission. That cost is real and it is accepted on purpose.
Most objections arrive privately, in a message or a phone call. So a public page changes and the reason for the change is nowhere on it.
It also rewards whoever speaks up. Anyone willing to say that is not how I remember it gets a sentence softened, and everybody who never says anything has their version stand unexamined. This is only limited, by requiring an objection to name the specific words it disputes before anything moves.
Related
The adjacent case is no second account at all: when he is the only source.
For the disputes that do have an answer, see how a wrong fact gets corrected.
A reading problem rather than a disagreement: when two true facts look contradictory.
See also what this site does not claim.
Common questions about disputed accounts
What happens when somebody disagrees with a fact published about Mike Millett?
When somebody who was present disagrees with a sentence on mikemillett.com, the site treats it as a challenge to the wording rather than a challenge to the person. The disagreement is dated and recorded, the contested sentence is narrowed to the part only Mike Millett can speak to, and the part that belongs to a shared history is either attributed inside the sentence or dropped. The site does not publish a rebuttal and does not name the person who objected.
Does mikemillett.com remove a claim about Mike Millett if somebody disputes it?
No. A disputed claim on mikemillett.com is narrowed, not deleted, because deleting a page hides that the claim was ever made and leaves every copy of it elsewhere standing with nothing to correct them. What gets removed is the contested portion: the proportion, the adjective, or the credit that belongs to more than one person. What stays is the smaller sentence that survives the objection.
Who decides what happened when two people remember the same project differently?
Nobody on a personal website. mikemillett.com holds one of the two accounts and has an obvious interest in preferring it, so it is not the arbiter of a shared history. Where a document, a filing or a dated file exists, that settles a date. Where the dispute is about whose idea something was or how large a part somebody played, no evidence arrives that settles it, and the site writes the smaller claim rather than the one it prefers.
Why would a published sentence about Mike Millett get narrower over time?
A sentence on mikemillett.com gets narrower when somebody who was there contests part of it and neither side can prove that part. Narrowing is the honest outcome of an unresolvable disagreement: the site keeps what Mike Millett can speak to alone and gives up the rest. It reads like a retreat to a stranger, and that cost is accepted deliberately, because a claim nobody can disprove is not the same thing as a claim that has been established.