Mike Wise wasn’t.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post sports columnist decided to tweet a fabricated claim that Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger would be given a five game suspension by the NFL. Wise later said the erroneous tweet was his way of showing that “anybody will print anything.”

Well, he proved that people would pass along information if it comes from a reputable sports reporter, and that said sports writer will face a storm of criticism, admit on the radio that his gambit was a “stupid, irresponsible” idea, and be suspended for one month by his employer. A fantastic experiment, that one.

In the end, all Wise illustrated was that the credibility he has built up was easy to undermine. Here’s part of the apology he issued at the start of his radio program this week:

I didn’t put ‘kidding‘ in that sentence. I didn’t put ‘just joking.’ I could even say I thought I corrected it within five minutes and didn’t realize my Twitter server was busy 30 to 40 minutes later. But the truth is that if I waited one second to make my intentions and sourcing clear, I waited too long.

Wise’s transgression was even more notable because it occurred in the same city and featured the same supposedly unreliable platform as another event this week. When combined, they provide a tale of two Twitters and a case study of the disruptive nature of new media platforms. The new openness breeds a certain amount of chaos and unpredictability.Wise seems to long for the old, closed world of media where the gatekeepers stood watch and the audience stayed silent. But when a gunman took hostages at the headquarters of the Discovery Channel this week, the news broke on Twitter. Along with the live feed of TBD TV, it was one of the best places to follow breaking news about the standoff …

via Wise Up : CJR, my latest column for Columbia Journalism Review.

… The challenge is to find a way to quickly and accurately sort and evaluate a mass of incoming reports according to your preferences. This is a core element of distributed verification, which I called “the best way to engineer trust in today’s information environment” in a previous column about WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan documents.

This is where SwiftRiver comes in. I got in touch with Jon Gosier, a co-founder of SwiftRiver and the CEO of African software consultancy Appfrica, to talk about the project.

“The big motivation behind SwiftRiver, to be quite frank, was to solve two problems Ushahidi was having,” he told me by e-mail. “One, how to verify crowd sourced information, and two, how to filter realtime streams of data when it became overwhelming, without sacrificing the integrity of the stream. In other words, how can you speed up the process of vetting information from Twitter, RSS feeds, SMS and email.”

via The Challenge of Verifying Crowdsourced Information : CJR. I've been delinquent in posting links to my CJR columns. But the most recent ones are listed in the sidebar to the right.

That doesn’t come close to capturing the nature of Breitbart’s transgressions. And it’s pretty rich considering Breitbart’s Big Journalism site has made a regular feature of demanding that other media outlets issue corrections.

Thanks, snuh!

So were these changes updates or corrections? And, in either case, why didn’t the site acknowledge the changing nature of its articles? The New York Times, for example, requires its continuous news desk to note when articles have been updated. And adding corrections for factual errors is a broad standard in the industry. So is Politico inserting new information without noting it, or is it also deleting errors without adding in corrections? [Be sure to scroll down to read my latest updates to this piece.]

Slate certainly made it seem as though scrubbing is an issue at the website. And then, close to three hours after the Slate piece went live, a correction was added at the top of the piece:

Correction, 6:45 p.m.: Shortly after we published this piece about Politico’s unacknowledged corrections, Politico contacted us to tell us that it had acknowledged almost all these corrections. (Politico appended the corrections after we asked about them but before we published our story.) To see our corrections of our mistakes about their corrections—still with us?—click here.

That’s a notable development considering the response that Politico’s top editor had when first contacted by Slate:

Editor-in-Chief John Harris said: “I’m not sure there needs to be a black-and-white policy.” But Politico “ought to think about” keeping a running list of corrections, and its unwritten policy. Politico’s unwritten policy is to append notices to articles “where something substantive was not correct,” Harris said. In many of the stories cited in the sidebar, Harris acknowledged, “there was no thought or judgment applied.

The fact that most of the problematic Politico articles noted by Slate were corrected after Politico was notified of the changes suggests that the site could indeed benefit from a “black-and-white-policy.” Honestly, though, shouldn’t a good policy be black-and-white, meaning clear? Isn’t that kind of the idea behind creating a policy?

It seems Politico has not been operating with a proper corrections policy, let alone decent procedures. (An unwritten policy is usually no policy at all.) As a result, articles were being changed, facts were being corrected — and nobody was telling readers. Bottom line: scrubbing is unethical and unprofessional. It breaks the contract of correction that has existed between journalists and the public for hundreds of years. If that’s too old school for you, Politico also violated Jeff Jarvis’ newer maxim of “publish and correct.”

Politico needs to get its corrections act together. Scott Rosenberg has also weighed in with a call for “versioning” — a similar approach to how software is updated — as a way to deal with the evolution of news stories on the web. It’s a good suggestion, and I know of one person who is already using this as a way to communicate updates and corrections. As a starting point, Politico needs to draft a clear policy, create the necessary related procedures, educate staff, and implement any necessary technical measures to enable corrections.

Let’s hope this Slate study provides Politico with the motivation to get it done with the kind of speed that the site is so famous for.

UPDATE July 21, 12:00 pm: It’s important to note that the Slate story has resulted in a rather suprising admission by the publication. This was added as an update to its story:

As Politico’s editors also pointed out to us, many of the changes Politico made to its stories would have been permitted under Slate’s own corrections policy. Under Slate’s policy, we do not notify readers about minor corrections that we ourselves catch within 24 hours of publication.

Well, that’s interesting. Hypocritical, too… This is the first I’ve heard of the Slate policy and they should change it. Twenty-four hours is a long time online, and the proper policy is to fix errors and correct them, regardless of time frame. I’m curious as to what is and isn’t a “minor correction” in Slate’s definition, but it seems to me that a factual error or typo that changes the meaning of a sentence should be noted whether you catch it 10 minutes or 10 hours after publication. The idea is to be transparent with your readers. This policy may help editors save time, and writers save face, but it does nothing for readers.

Slate does a lot of things well with their corrections, and I often cite them as an example of a publication that has a good online corrections format. But this is a bad policy and they should change it. There’s a certain sense of karmic justice, though, that Slate’s takedown of Politico has had the unintended effect of shining a light on a misguided Slate policy.

UPDATE July 21, 12:25 pm: Here’s a statement from Tim Grieve, deputy managing editor of Politico:

Slate has now posted no fewer than six separate corrections to its story and the accompanying sidebar, and we’re still pushing them to correct at least one more significant factual error.

They’ve admitted they were wrong about the number of stories on which we posted corrections; they’ve admitted they were wrong about the substance of one of those corrections; they’ve admitted they were wrong on a number of specific stories where they said we hadn’t posted corrections when we had; and they’ve admitted that they misquoted a WRITTEN statement I provided to them. They also mischaracterized comments made by POLITICO’s editor-in-chief; we’re still trying to get them to own up to that one.

Their story now begins with a 50-word correction and ends with a 125-word correction, and the sidebar is studded with doozies like this: “Correction, July 20, 2010: A previous version of this article incorrectly reported that Politico hadn’t yet acknowledged its correction.”

We all make mistakes, of course, and Slate caught us making some: We’ve managed to correct some stories on our site without posting the formal correction notices that our policy requires. We’ve gone back and added correction notices to all of the factual corrections Slate identified, and we’re taking steps to prevent this problem from recurring.

In the meantime, Slate now admits that it doesn’t even try to live up to the standard it would hold us to. I’m not sure if that’s irony or hypocrisy, but either way it probably should have given Slate pause before going on the attack.

The results of MediaBugs’ first survey of Bay Area media correction practices show that 21 out of 28 news sites examined — including many of the region’s leading daily newspapers and broadcast news outlets — provide no corrections link on their websites’ home pages and article pages. The websites for 17 of the 28 news organizations examined have no corrections policy or substantive corrections content at all.

Sites that do offer corrections-related content frequently make it relatively difficult to find: It is located two or three obscure clicks into the site, or requires visitors to use the site’s search function. Once located, the corrections content is, in most cases, poorly organized and not easily navigated.

As Rosenberg noted in an email to me, this isn’t exactly surprising. Online correction pages are still the exception, not the rule. The same is true for error reporting tools. The MediaBugs report offers some much needed proof that media organizations aren’t putting the proper amount of thought and effort into corrections. Here’s what Rosenberg wrote in a blog post for PBS MediaShift Idea Lab (where I’m an editor):

Fifteen years ago, in the early days of web publishing, it might have been understandable for editors to have a hard time figuring out how to handle corrections: This pliable medium was new and strange.

But news on the web is no longer in its infancy, and “We’re new to this” just doesn’t cut it anymore as an explanation for the kind of poor practices our MediaBugs survey documents. The explanations you generally hear are truthful but don’t excuse the problems: “Our content management system makes it too hard to do that” or “we just don’t have the resources to do that” or “we’ve been meaning to fix that for a while but never seem to get around to it.”

The web excels at connecting people. That’s what its technology is for. Yet when it comes to the most basic areas of accuracy and accountability, the professional newsrooms of the Bay Area (and so many other communities) continue to do a poor job of connecting with their own readers.

Rosenberg and I agree that it’s important to create a standardized error reporting function for the web. Something that every organization can implement in the same way. (He cited RSS as an example of how this kind of standardization can work.) I wrote about this idea in a recent column for Columbia Journalism Review:

Another example would be RSS. One way that it achieved mass adoption was by becoming standardized on major blogging platforms and then adopted by major Web sites. At the same time, the adoption of the RSS icon created a universal visual cue that helped drive understanding among Internet users.

Rosenberg is currently pondering the creation of something similar for “report an error” functionality. There are currently some large news Web sites that offer this—including the Toronto Star and Huffington Post (though theirs is hidden near the bottom of articles)—but it is by no means a standard. The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and CNN, among many others, don’t include that option on their articles and pages. It’s such a simple, effective way to collect error reports, not to mention give readers a chance to participate and contribute.

But where it should be placed on the page? Do we need a universal icon? How about the interface that pops up after you click on that button? Should that be standardized? The fundamental idea is sound, but there are lots of details to work out. Rosenberg is thinking of the best way to move forward with the idea, and I’m hoping to help.

Who else wants to pitch in?

I also dedicated a recent edition of my weekly Columbia Journalism Review column to the issue of corrections reporting.

Thanks, Daniel!

Here’s an excerpt of a recent blog post from Rosenberg:

One of the early field results of the MediaBugs experiment is a simple one. It turns out that, in the case of many news organizations, including some pretty prominent ones, just figuring out how to tell the newsroom that there’s a problem requires persistence and stamina.

Consider this anonymous error report we received at MediaBugs a few days ago. It said that the Wall Street Journal, in a recent book review, had misspelled the name of the author being reviewed. The book is Mac McClelland’s For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question. The Journal spelled her name “McLelland.” (The publisher’s page listing the book, which I’ll take as an authoritative source, spells it with the extra “c.”) …

Rosenberg then spends several paragraphs detailing the process he undertook to pursue this correction. Imagine how many people would have abandoned their quest for correction after the first few minutes of trying. (Most of them, if you ask me.) Writes Rosenberg:

I went to these lengths because, right now, this is my work. But we shouldn’t have any illusions about normal members of the public. They won’t jump through these hoops. They will conclude — rightly or wrongly but very understandably, either way — that the newsroom doesn’t actually care about hearing about its mistakes.

Now here’s the beginning of a new post from Follman:

Recently a MediaBugs user reported that an Associated Press story had misidentified the “Seinfeld” character George Costanza as Jerry’s “neighbor” on the show. Eventually the AP’s west coast entertainment editor, Steve Loeper, responded to an inquiry about the matter, and the AP subsequently decided to publish a correction.

It was a positive outcome, but here’s the rub: Getting to it involved no less than contacting five different people, sending eight emails and making three phone calls — and it took more than three weeks to get a result.

I suspect the MediaBugs team will continue to encounter this kind of disorganization and lack of accountability. As Rosenberg wrote, “If we want to understand why people don’t trust the media, this might be a very good place to start.”

It also helps explain why the number of published corrections is tiny when compared with the actual number of errors.

I gave my usual spiel about errors and corrections and all of the other topics I tend to cover. But one thing I don’t usually talk about is how I handle corrections on this website. (I often talk about corrections for the Regret the Error book.) While in Phoenix, a few students asked me about how I deal with corrections here. That set off a “blog post alert” in my mind. So here’s the resulting post — and some new corrections options.

In the Beginning

In the early days of this site, I would place a correction within the post itself and then repeat all of the week’s corrections in a round-up post. The weekly post was borrowed from Slate, and they continue to do this. I did the round-ups until late 2006 and then stopped. I honestly don’t remember why I stopped; but I definitely failed in that I should have explained clearly why I wasn’t going to do the weekly round-ups anymore.

The other thing I started doing from the beginning is credit people by first name when they spot a mistake made by me. I still do that.

Tagging

When I migrated the site from TypePad to WordPress in 2007,  I started using the “regret corrections” tag for all of my corrections. Not that I told you. I should have mentioned this in my post about the new site, but didn’t. That was a mistake.

It was also in 2007 that I started using the * to indicate corrections. The first post to use this method (which was again borrowed from Slate) was my year-end round-up for 2007. From then on, I placed a * at the end of any sentence that required a correction. Then I would place a correction at the bottom of the post and put another * there as well. (Just take a look at the posts listed under “regret corrections.”) The idea is readers can follow the *s to see exactly where the error occurred.

Moving Forward

So that’s where things have been up until today. I’m now announcing a couple of additions to help you track my screw-ups. The first is that any corrected post will have the word “Corrected” added to the headline, as was the case here. The second new element is a dedicated RSS feed for my corrections. Subscribe here. I’m also promoting this feed in the upper right hand corner of the site.

One other thing: Since launch, I have placed all of the corrections to my non-Regret work on this site. Since 2007, I’ve used the “craig’s correction” tag for these outside corrections. I will continue to post these on this site, and I’ll continue to use that tag. But now you can also subscribe to an RSS feed of these corrections. (This feed is also listed in the upper right.)

Do you have any other suggestions? Let me know in the comments.

Oh, and thanks ASU students!

One of my pet concepts is that we should be pushing out corrections, rather than requiring readers to go hunting for them.

Pushing out corrections means offering them via RSS or email, placing them within a listing of the latest news and articles, and finding ways to make corrections more prominent, and more a part of the river of news. I touched on this idea in a post, and in this column for Columbia Journalism Review. This post at Newsless raised similar ideas.

Well, now add Steven Levy to the list of people who are thinking about pushing out corrections. In a piece for the May issue of Wired, he examines why Amazon isn’t pushing out corrections to its Kindle books:

Before a recent trip, I downloaded the latest Stephen Hunter novel to my Kindle. Hunter writes about shooters, so it’s not surprising that the name of the book is I, Sniper.

Not that you’d know it from the title screen. The only words on that e-ink page were “I, Snipper.” …

I thought “snipper” was a pretty big snafu, so I decided to play a little joke on my buddy, an editor at Simon & Schuster, which published the book. I took a picture of the misspelled title page and emailed it to him. The next day he emailed me back: “Because of your eagle eye, Amazon is fixing today, even correcting existing Kindle purchases.”

So why is my title page still wrong? According to Amazon.com’s Drew Herdner, “When we find a copyediting or formatting error in a book, we ask the publisher for a new file and replace the one in the Kindle Store so that new purchases of the book do not have the error. We will update the file for a book a customer has already purchased only when the customer asks us to.”

My Kindle purchase “was treated just like an error in a normal p-book,” says Simon & Schuster’s senior publishing manager, Leah Wasielewski, using a term that will be increasingly useful as the e-variety approaches the norm. The publisher’s belief that Amazon had automatically changed sold versions, too, was “a miscommunication,” she adds.

The whole idea of tampering with books after someone buys them, of course, doesn’t apply to, um, p-books, which are not only in the possession of buyers but also inconveniently stamped indelibly with ink …

But sometimes a book can stand a little mending. Consider the case of a copyediting mistake that changes the meaning of a crucial sentence in a novel. Or a nonfiction author who wants to enrich a book with a new chapter about developments in the field. And wouldn’t a travel book be improved if it reflected new places to visit and current phone numbers?

All good examples. Ebooks are living books. Publishers and authors should find a way to easily and ethically offer corrections and updates to readers.

Many marvel over the magazine’s pedantic process for checking the facts in every article, caption, cartoon, poem and work of fiction. I dedicated a chapter of my book to fact checking, and recounted many of the amusing and apocryphal tales of checkers going far beyond the call of duty. For my research, I interviewed two fact checkers from the New Yorker, though only one spoke on the record. I had also approached Peter Canby, the head of the department and a senior editor at the magazine, for an interview. He politely declined.

Fortunately, we both delivered speeches at a recent fact checking conference in Germany, and I had the chance to speak with him. I also shot video of some of Canby’s interesting and amusing keynote speech. He began his talk by stating that it would be off the record, but I managed to get him to allow me to post a few excerpts. Three clips are below.

This one explains how they hire checkers, and the skills they look for:

Here’s some insight into what the magazine expects from its writers when it comes to fact checking:

Canby describes what he sees as the ultimate value of fact checking:

And so it was that I spent the last weekend of March in Hamburg in the offices of the famous German weekly magazine Der Spiegel as a speaker and participant in a conference dedicated to fact checking. I was of course at a disadvantage in that I was one of only four English-speaking presenters; the rest of the conference took place in German.

My fellow North American presenters were Peter Canby, a senior editor at the New Yorker who heads up its fact checking department; Sarah Smith, managing editor of the New York Times Magazine and a former fact checker at the New Yorker; and Scott Maier, an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication and the leading newspaper accuracy researcher working today.

Nearly all of us who spoke in English couldn’t help but note what a pleasure it was to participate in, wonder of wonders, a conference about fact checking. God bless those crazy Germans. None of us were willing to offer the checker’s guarantee that it was the first ever such gathering on record, but it was the only one we could think of.

The real news of the conference, at least for us visitors, was the massive fact checking operation at Der Spiegel. The other bit of news was that Der Spiegel has a wonderfully outrageous cafeteria and meeting space. You can view all my photos on Flickr, but here’s a sample:

Can you imagine eating there every day? Just looking at it makes me want to buy some shirts with butterfly collars, and grow a moustache. But back to fact checking…

My colleagues from the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker were just as amazed as me to discover the German weekly has roughly 70 full-time people in its fact checking and research department, as well as others who work part-time. By comparison, the New Yorker has 16 checkers, including Canby, making it the major checking operation one of the major checking operations by North American standards. [Update/Correction April 9: Canby emailed to say Vanity Fair has over 20 checkers, making it larger than the New Yorker's department. That's why I struck the text above.]  You can read all about Der Spiegel’s checking in my new column for Columbia Journalism Review.

This slide, which was part of a presentation by the head of the magazine’s checking and research department, illustrated that Der Spiegel’s approach is to hire checkers who have specific expertise in different areas. Here’s a list of some of their checkers (to give you an idea, their medical expert/checker is a former physician):

Though Der Spiegel’s approach is unique, there is one way in which German fact checking is similar to what we have (or used to have)  in Canada and the US: it’s on the decline. Very few publications — someone at the conference estimated there are six in all of Germany — practice it. The tough economic times have resulted in the reduction of staff checkers, and those that are left are looking for new ways to justify their existence.

During my discussion with a Der Spiegel fact checker and the deputy head of the department, they said they are trying to use their internal database of information and sources to generate topic pages for the website. You can view the Angela Merkel topic page here.

For them, one way to ensure the survival of fact checking is to offer something other than checking and research. In short, they’re trying to generate content, not just verify it. The department is also hoping to save time and resources by moving away from paper-based checking and towards a digital workflow. If you wonder what I mean by paper-based, take a look at this slide showing an article that was worked on by a checker (click for larger):

In terms of English-language content, I shot a bit of video of Scott Maier’s talk about newspaper accuracy. He shared some of his research into newspaper accuracy in the United States. (I have more about this research here and here.) Here’s an excerpt:

One quote from Maier that stood out for me: “In America, journalists are better educated than ever,  yet the rate of error is higher than ever. Something is going wrong.” Also, here are photos of some of the slides that were part of Maier’s presentation. These will give you a quick and dirty look at his new data about Italian and Swiss newspaper (which has not yet been published). Click for larger:

Finally, for any German speakers out there, here’s a lengthy TV report about fact checking and the conference:

In the meantime, feel free to send along any notable corrections and errors.

Thanks!

Here’s a notable section (emphasis theirs):

Is online content, with its rapid turnaround requirement, held to the same standards as material that appears in print? In general, the answer is no. Over half (51%) of original content that appears on Web sites is either not copy-edited at all, or is copy-edited less rigorously than in print. Moreover, just under half (43%) of respondents say that there is either a lower standard for fact-checking online (35%) or no fact-checking at all (8%).

Web sites are more likely to have lower standards in these areas as their traffic rises, and when content decisions are made by independent Web editors.

These bullet points are also of note:

• Fact checking (excluding blogs) is less rigorous online than in print.
• Web sites with more than 50,000 visitors a month fact-check less rigorously than sites with less traffic.
• Fact-checking is more likely to be lax when independent Web editors are in charge of online content decisions.
• Many magazines Web sites correct errors without acknowledging the mistakes.
• Error correction rises with Web traffic and profitability, but methods of doing so are inconsistent.
• Error corrections rise when independent Web editors make content decisions, but independent Web editors are more likely than print counterparts or publishers to correct with no notice.

The report has some additional detail (below), but those are the headlines. Some thoughts:

• Scrubbing is rampant. The vast majority of magazine websites are not publishing corrections for “typos or misspellings.” Also note that the report refers to these as “minor errors.” Well, not all typos and misspellings are equal. Yes, a typo that doesn’t change the meaning or reader’s understanding of a sentence (or introduce a factual error) can be fixed without requiring a correction. But what if a typo results in you reporting that Queen Elizabeth “lays up to 2,000 eggs per day”? Would they scrub that, too? We don’t really know. But once you are in the habit of scrubbing, it’s easy to start disappearing factual errors, which is unethical.
• Fact checking is seen as a “nice to have” for online magazine content. It’s been relegated to luxury status. Within magazines, print and online are seen very differently, with print viewed as the place to invest in fact checking and copy editing.
• One thing the report doesn’t make clear is what it means by fact checking. People who fact check for a living often say there’s no such thing as partial or “less rigorous” fact checking. Either check all of the facts, or don’t call it fact checking. So it would be useful to know how these respondents defined fact checking. Are professional fact checkers reviewing the online content? Or is an editor told to, for example, check the names and numbers before publication? It’s possible what respondents refer to as fact checking is, in fact, not in any way related to what traditional magazine fact checking looks like.

More fact checking data from the report:

Fact-checking (excluding blogs) is less rigorous online than in print for 35%
of respondents (Fig. 19).
• 8% do not fact-check print or online content.
• 8% do not fact-check online-only content.
• 27% say online-only content is fact-checked, but less rigorously than print
content.
• 57% use the same fact-checking process for online-only and print content.
In total, 84% of magazines surveyed do at least some fact-checking of their online-
only content and 92% fact-check their print content.
Figure 19: Fact-checking
Which best describes how online-only content is fact-checked?

More about corrections:

Many magazines Web sites correct errors without acknowledging the
mistakes (Fig. 23).
• 87% correct minor errors, such as typos or misspellings, with no indication to readers.
• 45% correct factual errors with no indication to readers.
• 37% correct factual errors and append an editor’s note detailing the nature of the error to the content where the mistake appeared.
• 6% leave major factual errors in as they originally appeared in the content, but add an editor’s note at the point of the error.
• 1% note all errors in a special section of the Web site.

I’m also hoping you can help me with an upcoming column for CJR. Last week, I wrote about plagiarism. I examined why news organizations don’t use plagiarism detection services to weed out thieves. For this Friday’s column, I’m offering a range of advice to help writers avoid accidental plagiarism, and to help editors spot a thief or fabulist. I’d appreciate receiving any tips you have. For credit, of course!

Sunday is the biggest day for Times corrections. It’s when the paper corrects errors from the previous Sunday’s paper, which includes many special sections, as well the magazines. But, yes, 36 is a high number. From the NYTPicker:

It may or may not be a record — we don’t have the energy to plow through more than 100 years of back issues — but today’s NYT corrections column is large as any we’ve been able to find in recent memory. And it’s hard not to see the surge as a reflection of what happens to a newspaper that has lost more than 200 editorial employees to buyouts and layoffs in the last two years.

Other papers have seen an increase in corrections in the wake of layoffs and buyouts, but it’s tough to say if the number of corrections published by the Times has been on the rise. The paper uses an internal database to keep track of its corrections, so it has the data. (It’s also important to note that the number of corrections is not the same as the number of errors.)

This is the pick of the litter from today’s Times:

An article on Nov. 22 about the Dutch province of Friesland included a number of errors.

In reference to Friesland’s history, it was the feudal lords — not the Romans — who had no success conquering the Frisians in the 13th and 14th centuries. The Frisians were mostly Germanic people, not just Saxons, who had migrated there in the fourth and fifth centuries — not the first century. Friesland was considered an autonomous and proud region up to the 1500s — not “through” the Middle Ages. And it fell to the Habsburg Empire — not to the Holy Roman Empire — at the beginning of the 16th century. Also, while Friesland’s agrarian landscape is indeed dotted with terps, mounds measuring from a few to 20 feet high, terps are also found in the North Sea marshlands, encompassing parts of Holland, Germany and Denmark; the mounds are not found just in current-day Friesland.

Of the towns whose squares and alleys the writer explored, it was Stavoren — not Hindeloopen — that had a more prosperous seaport than Amsterdam up until the 1400s, not the 1700s. And the neighboring towns Stavoren and Hindeloopen, in addition to having a thriving trade with Scandinavia, also had a robust trade with the Baltic countries — but not with Russia.

A reader pointed out the errors in an e-mail message on Nov. 29; this correction was delayed for research.