The campaign this site exists for is now underway: a deep recording-history section for every one of the 214 song pages — mix variants, session chronology, studio techniques — authored one page per session against the mounted primary-source library. Recording the Beatles (Kehew & Ryan, 2006) joined Lewisohn as a first-tier source on 29 May, and the first page went in on 30 May.
Just as important as the authoring is the verification loop wrapped around it, formalised the same week: every session opens by re-verifying the previous session’s citations against the source PDFs before any new work begins. Fresh eyes on yesterday’s work, every day, forever.
Off by exactly four
The loop paid for itself within a day. Cross-session review of one page found all eleven of its Kehew/Ryan citations off by exactly four pages. The cause is mundane and vicious: the page number a PDF reader displays is the file’s internal index, and it differs from the printed page number on the book’s own footer by a fixed offset — different for every scanned book. Every citation now has to be verified against the printed footer extracted from the page itself, offsets documented per source. A mundane bug class, permanently closed.
Errors at scale are still errors
A new cross-page check — grep the whole corpus whenever a fact gets corrected, because a wrong fact rarely lives alone — fired for the first time on 1 June and surfaced a systemic infobox error across roughly 60 pages, swept in a single session. The same day, an audit found our internal working vocabulary had leaked into reader-facing copy on six pages; patched, and the editorial-standards page expanded so the boundary is explicit.
And a source died. Asked to justify a citation labelled “Daniels 2024,” we inspected the document’s provenance and found a community-compiled variations guide of Usenet-era lineage — valuable to fans, but not the archival tier this site cites. It was stripped from the entire corpus, no exceptions. A reference work that will not delete a convenient source is not a reference work.